Is 基督{キリスト} really an 当{あ}て字{じ}? I am learning the word for Christ, . According to the dictionary I make use of, it can be written in kanji as , but the entry indicates that it is an ateji spelling. I did some extra research and the word appears as ateji in other sources too, for example in this wikipedia entry . However, I think that the meanings of both kanji are far from random and instead they actually suit the meaning of the word Christ: * fundamental, radical * coach, command, supervise From a believer's standpoint, Christ (or God) is the fundamental actor that supervises our lives, so it kind of makes sense meaning-wise. Why is marked as an ateji then?

The use of ateji does not always disregard the semantic content of the characters.

It's true that many ateji use the phonetic content of individual characters to represent words, ignoring the meaning of those characters. But sometimes the characters are chosen so that the meaning is also relevant. This is known as phono-semantic matching. Wikipedia gives the well-known examples of () and (), where both the semantic and phonetic content are matched. I haven't done a detailed search of the etymology of , but if the semantic content of the characters is related to the overall meaning of the word, this does not preclude it from being assigned as ateji.