What's the primary use for the kanji: 祐

[Jaydent1]

I've seen it listed highly in multiple word frequency lists, and Jisho ranks it the 1706th most used Kanji in newspapers. I understand that it's often used for the name ゆう. Even then, is it that common?

#kanji 祐 - Jisho.org

 

[nekojita]

Never seen it outside names. Of course, newspapers do have lots of names in so I wouldn't be surprised if word frequency lists which base themselves on newspapers showed up a lot of common 人名漢字 (name kanji)

A site search on Yomiuri showed hits like
大空祐飛 (an actress, former Takarazuka member - 祐飛 = ゆうひ)
鈴木馨祐 (a politician - 馨祐 = けいすけ)
柴岡祐真 (another politician - 祐真 = ゆうま)
品川祐 (comedian 祐 = ひろし)

As you can see from the above, kanji readings in names can easily be all over the place, so unfamiliar name readings are difficult to guess (and quite often readings will be given anyway - in fiction often at least the first time a character is introduced).

The main issue with most of these word frequency lists is they're just off newspapers or generic sets of books (and most people copy that same one jisho uses, so if you saw it in multiple places chances are it's multiple copies of similar sets of data), and they don't take into account context. You don't need to be able to read a name to read the text containing the name (especially since the reading may be given anyway).

 

[Jaydent1]

Never seen it outside names. Of course, newspapers do have lots of names in so I wouldn't be surprised if word frequency lists which base themselves on newspapers showed up a lot of common 人名漢字 (name kanji)

A site search on Yomiuri showed hits like
大空祐飛 (an actress, former Takarazuka member - 祐飛 = ゆうひ)
鈴木馨祐 (a politician - 馨祐 = けいすけ)
柴岡祐真 (another politician - 祐真 = ゆうま)
品川祐 (comedian 祐 = ひろし)

As you can see from the above, kanji readings in names can easily be all over the place, so unfamiliar name readings are difficult to guess (and quite often readings will be given anyway - in fiction often at least the first time a character is introduced).

The main issue with most of these word frequency lists is they're just off newspapers or generic sets of books (and most people copy that same one jisho uses, so if you saw it in multiple places chances are it's multiple copies of similar sets of data), and they don't take into account context. You don't need to be able to read a name to read the text containing the name (especially since the reading may be given anyway).

I had a teacher named Hiroshi, and he was a bit of a comedian. Never checked the Kanji for his name though!

Ah that's good to know. It does seem like they often give reading for obscure names. I also noticed that one of the readings for 祐 was たすける, but the verb is written 助ける.

I've been making my way through a word frequency list (top 3000) that I found recently. There are some questionable entries that don't seem to belong, but for the most part it's seems al right. Learned (or rather, became acquainted) about 50 new words and their kanji today. Words like 様子、以上、通り that have seemingly ambiguous/diverse meanings (at least to me) are probably taking up the majority of my time...

You wouldn't happen to know of a really good source for getting detailed descriptions for these kinds of words would you? Right now, I have just been searching them up in Jisho, and looking at all of the available example sentences to see the different ways in which they are used. But the actual description Jisho gives for word meanings is usually very short.

 

[nekojita]

祐 seems like it must be a related/alternate form (助 is also read すけ in some names).

Feel free to skip over anything that seems obscure, weird, or not very useful (to you) on those lists, would be the main point I'd make. The newspaper ones are heavy on politics/economics type words.

Most of the freely available dictionaries use "EDICT", which is okay for a lot of things but not the best for trying to understand finer nuance.

I suggest you learn to use :
国語・英語・四字熟語のオンライン辞書 - goo辞書
(辞書すべて = all dictionaries, 国語 = japanese dictionary, 和英 is Japanese-English and 英和 for English-Japanese)
and
株式会社アルク
not a dictionary but good for finding example sentences and for looking up short phrases.