Meaning & readings
route, way, road
Origin
This character combines a radical meaning "walk" or "movement" with a sound hint. The walking radical on the left suggests the general idea of traveling or going somewhere. The component on the right, 余, provides a sound hint for how to pronounce the character — it doesn't directly mean anything related to "road," but it tells you roughly how it sounds. Together, the shape evolved to represent a path or route that people travel along.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 余
- ⻌
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 162
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #717 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+09014