Appears in a result page in a tsumego book. I think it's "variation" (at least appears in solutions that look plausible, but different from the "correct" variation) but couldn't find it in Sensei's.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

It roughly means 'explanation'.

Thanks! Now I get it, it's why white (or black) does answer in a certain way when it looks like another way would make sense.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I love it when a Chinese word is identical to Japanese (well minus the character simplification) and it actually means the same thing for once!

By the way, I recommend http://www.nciku.com/ as an excellent Chinese dictionary, it does handwriting character recognition too.

RBerenguel,

説明

说明

shuo¹ming²

Codexus It's actually the other way around since Japan implemented variations from the Chinese writing system

Of course, I didn't mean to imply it went the other way around. (The simplification is more recent though, but that's another story)

It must mean "explanation"; in Japanese 説明 (setsumei), means just that. When it occurs as a verb it is 説明する (setsumei suru), literally "to do explanation". The Chinese word marked in the photo means the same thing. I went to zhongwen.com and looked up the first character to confirm this. According to the website result, the word is pronounced shūomíng.

Most Japanese words of Chinese origin have meanings identical to their Chinese counterparts - even though they are written somewhat differently nowadays. Also, some Japanese kanji are simplified versions of traditional Chinese characters. For example, compare 発 and 發. Then compare these with 发.

Take, for example, 大丈夫, right?

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