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| 穫 | |||||||||||||||
| Meaning | to harvest; to reap | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radical | 禾 + 14 | Strokes | 19 | ||||||||||||
| Composition | ⿰禾蒦 | ||||||||||||||
| Formation | Phono-semantic | ||||||||||||||
| Unicode | U+7A6B | ||||||||||||||
[ Mandarin ]
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[ Cantonese ]
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[ Japanese ]
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[ Korean ]
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[ Vietnamese ]
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| 穫 across regional standards | ||
| Traditional | 穫 | U+7A6B |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese | 穫 | U+7A6B |
| Korean | 穫 | U+7A6B |
| Simplified | 获 | U+83B7 |
| Three share one code point; the simplified form is a separate character. | ||
穫 (simplified Chinese: 获; pronounced huò in Mandarin) is a Chinese character meaning to harvest or to reap. It is a narrow, agricultural word: where English "harvest" stretches to cover any kind of gathering, 穫 refers specifically to cutting and bringing in a standing crop.
The character almost never appears alone in modern usage. Across four languages it survives chiefly inside a single compound — 收穫 in Chinese, 収穫 in Japanese, 수확 in Korean, thu hoạch in Vietnamese — all of which pair it with a character meaning "to gather in" and all of which mean both a literal harvest and, far more often, the payoff from any sustained effort.
穫 is also the centerpiece of one of the more consequential mergers in the mainland Chinese simplification program. It shares a simplified form, 获, with the unrelated character 獲 "to capture," collapsing a distinction that traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all still maintain.
The core sense of 穫 is to cut a ripened crop and take it in. The grain radical 禾 on its left fixes the meaning to cereal agriculture, and classical usage keeps it there — 穫 is what a farmer does to millet, wheat, or rice at the end of the growing season, as distinct from planting, tending, or storing.
This narrowness is the character's defining feature. Chinese has separate characters for gathering generally, for collecting objects, and for taking possession of something, and 穫 is not a substitute for any of them. It belongs to the field.
The figurative extension is old and now dominant. A harvest is what effort yields, so 穫 came to describe the yield of any effort at all: what a student takes away from a hard course, what a researcher gets out of a year of work, what a traveler brings home.
In every modern language that uses the character, this abstract sense is far more common than the agricultural one. A Japanese executive describing a productive meeting, a Korean student reviewing a semester, and a Chinese reader closing a good book will all reach for a compound built on 穫 without any thought of a field.
穫 is a phono-semantic compound written 禾 on the left and 蒦 on the right.
蒦 is more interesting than most phonetics, because it is not an arbitrary sound-marker but a meaningful character in its own right. It is an ideogrammic compound: 雈, an owl, above 又, a hand. The image is a hand closing on a bird — that is, catching something.
This means 穫 can be read as combining "grain" with "catching": taking hold of the crop. Standard analysis treats 蒦 as the phonetic element, but as with many well-chosen phonetics, the sense of the component sits comfortably alongside the sense of the whole character rather than clashing with it.
蒦 generates a large family of characters, and one of them matters enormously for understanding 穫. Placing 蒦 beside 犭, the dog radical, gives 獲 (huò), meaning to capture, to catch, or to obtain — traditionally explained as hunting down and catching an animal with a dog.
The two characters are built on exactly the same logic, differing only in what is being taken:
| Character | Semantic element | Sense | Object |
|---|---|---|---|
| 穫 | 禾 (grain) | to reap | a crop |
| 獲 | 犭 (dog) | to catch, to obtain | game, and by extension anything won |
They are pronounced identically in Mandarin, which is why the pair is a standing source of spelling errors even among fluent writers. The rule is simple in principle: 穫 for what grows, 獲 for what is caught or won. 收穫 is a harvest; 獲得 is an acquisition.
When mainland China simplified its script, both characters were assigned the same replacement: 获. The new form is built from the 獲 side of the pair, keeping the grass and dog components and dropping the grain radical entirely.
The consequence is that simplified Chinese cannot distinguish reaping from capturing in writing. 收获 and 获得 use the same character despite descending from different ancestors, and a reader converting simplified text back to traditional must decide from context which original was meant — a problem that automated converters still get wrong.
Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all preserve the distinction. Korean preserves it most robustly of the four, because the two characters never merged in sound either: 穫 is read 확 (hwak) and 獲 is read 획 (hoek), so 수확 and 획득 are audibly different words. Japanese keeps the graphs apart but not the sounds, since both are read kaku.
The 蒦 component is drawn differently depending on the standard. Taiwan and Hong Kong write its top element as ⻀, the "ram's horn" form, which is the orthodox shape recorded in the Shuowen Jiezi. Mainland China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnamese Nôm all follow the Kangxi Dictionary in writing it as 艹, the grass radical.
This is a genuine difference in printed shape rather than a difference in the character, and it accounts for the varying stroke counts quoted in dictionaries: 19 strokes in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean typefaces, and 18 in mainland China.
穫 is U+7A6B, a CJK Unified Ideograph with no compatibility duplicates. The regional shapes described above are font differences within that one code point, exactly as with 漢 — a reader sees the ⻀ or the 艹 form depending on which regional font renders the text, not on which character was stored.
The other two members of the family are separately encoded:
| Character | Code point | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| 穫 | U+7A6B | to reap |
| 獲 | U+7372 | to capture, to obtain |
| 获 | U+83B7 | simplified form of both |
获 is a distinct character rather than a variant glyph, because it differs in its actual components — this is the same principle that keeps 漢 and 汉 apart. Converting between 穫 and 获 is therefore a text-conversion operation, and it is one that only runs cleanly in one direction. Going from traditional to simplified is mechanical; going back requires knowing whether the original was 穫 or 獲.
| Language | Reading | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mandarin Chinese | huò | Fourth tone; identical to the reading of 獲 |
| Cantonese | wok6 | Also identical to 獲 |
| Japanese (on'yomi) | kaku (カク) | A jōyō character with no commonly used native reading |
| Korean | hwak (확) | Taught with the gloss 거둘 확 (geodul hwak), "the hwak that means to gather"; distinct from 獲, read 획 |
| Vietnamese | hoạch | Appears in Sino-Vietnamese compounds only |
穫 is uncommon as a free-standing word and appears in a small set of compounds:
The proverb 一分耕耘，一分收穫 — a measure of effort brings a measure of harvest — is the character's most quoted appearance, and functions much as "you reap what you sow" does in English.
Written 穫, the character is effectively confined to one word and its derivatives:
Business Japanese leans on 収穫 heavily in its figurative sense. A meeting or trip described as having 収穫 produced something worthwhile, with no agricultural connotation whatsoever.
Read 확 (hwak), the character survives almost entirely inside one word:
Because Korean is written in hangul, the character itself is invisible in ordinary text, and 수확 functions as an unanalyzed word. The distinction from 획득 (獲得, "acquisition") is carried entirely by the different vowel, which is why Korean speakers rarely confuse the two concepts the way Chinese writers confuse the two characters.
Vietnamese preserves 穫 as hoạch in Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary: thu hoạch (收穫, harvest or gains) and thu hoạch được (to obtain a result). The related hoạch in kế hoạch ("plan") is a different character, 劃, and the two are unconnected despite the identical romanization.
This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — reconstructed Old Chinese phonology, dialectal readings, the full set of characters built on 蒦, and classical citations — can consult the following:
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