Meaning & readings
attack, advance on, succeed to, pile, heap
Origin
The character combines "clothing" (衣) with a sound hint (龍) that suggests the pronunciation. The base meaning of "pile" or "heap" likely comes from the idea of layering garments on top of each other—stacking clothes one over another. From this sense of layering and overlapping, the meaning extended to "attack" (striking in successive waves, one after another) and "succeed to" (one generation piling upon another). The sound component 龍 has nothing to do with the meaning; it simply helps indicate how the character should be pronounced.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 龍
- 衣
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 22
- Kangxi radical
- 145
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1130 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+08972