Meaning & readings
quake, shake, tremble, quiver, shiver
Origin
The character 震 combines rain at the top with a component that sounds like "shin" at the bottom. The rain part suggests something dramatic happening in the sky or weather, which naturally connects to the trembling and shaking of earthquakes and storms. The bottom component acts purely as a sound hint to show roughly how the character is pronounced in Chinese-derived readings, contributing nothing to the meaning itself. Together, these pieces create a character that represents the violent shaking and disturbance of earthquakes or thunder.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 雨
- 辰
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 15
- Kangxi radical
- 173
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #893 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+09707