Meaning & readings
bountiful, excellent, rich
On’yomi ホウ、ブ
Kun’yomi ゆた.か、とよ
Nanori て、で、と、ひろし、ふう、ぶん、ほ、ゆたか
Origin
This character combines a picture of a container or vessel at the top with a bean or legume at the bottom. Beans and grains were valuable staple foods in East Asia, so a container overflowing with or full of beans became a natural way to express the idea of abundance and wealth. The bottom component also acts as a classifier that marks this as a character related to food or crops. Together, the image of a full container of nutritious food conveyed the sense of being plentiful and prosperous.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Compound ideographic (combined meanings).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 151
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #762 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08C4A