駄 means “worthless, trivial, packhorse”

だ · da

Also: burdensome, pack horse, horse load, send by horse

On'yomi (Chinese reading)

ダ, タ

JLPT N1 · Taught in secondary school · 14 strokes

The story

A horse (馬) loaded fat (太): a packhorse, the plodding, cheap end of the stable. From there 駄 means trivial or worthless: 無駄 is waste, 駄目 is no good, 駄菓子 are penny candies, and 下駄 are wooden clogs.

Used in 無駄 (muda, waste), 駄目 (dame, no good), and 下駄 (geta, wooden clogs)

More from Odd & Ordinary

• 朴 simple
• 粗 coarse
• 凡 commonplace
• 冗 superfluous
• 汎 general
• 庸 mediocre
• 緻 fine
• 異 different
• 微 slight
• 詳 detailed
• 偏 biased
• 奇 strange

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Readings from KANJIDIC2, © EDRDG, CC BY-SA.