The Chinese character 可

And its phonetic component form

  1. to approve
  2. to permit
  3. can

可 is both a character and a phonetic character component

Everything you need to know about the Chinese character component 火 fire in an easily downloadable and sharable image

In addition to being a character on its own, is often used as a phonetic component in other Chinese characters.

When used as a component in a Chinese character, the phonetic component 可 brings its pronunciation “ke” to the words it’s in, or the words its in sound close to “ke”. In fact, as a rule of thumb, most words that contain  will either be pronounced “ke”, “ge” or “he”. Tones vary, however.

These characters all contain 可 and all sound like either “ke”, “ge” or “he”:

elder brother


what; how; why


Another possible pronunciations for the character component 可

The Chinese language is over 5000 years old, so, unsurprisingly, some characters’ pronunciations have evolved a little over time.

In addition to sometimes being pronounced “ge”, “ke” or “he”, 可 the phonetic component will also be found in Chinese words that have a totally different pronunciation.


You can find the character component 可 being pronounced “e”, “a” or “qi” in words like:

ē: flatter

ā: prefix used before monosyllabic names

qí: strange

You’ll also find the phonetic component 可 in many other Chinese characters. Browse the full list here.

All 80,000+ Chinese characters share the same character components. Chinese character components are therefore essential for Chinese learners: they are the building blocks of Chinese. Character character components help tremendously with understanding a character: they provide information on its meaning or on its pronunciation. In short, knowing character components will help you analyse, learn and remember each Chinese character much better.


Related: Explore the key character components to know one by one, with this selection of meaning components and phonetic components.

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ninchaChinese Character Component 可 ke (phonetic)