Meaning & readings
mister, you, ruler, male name suffix
Origin
This character combines a sound hint with a meaning component. The bottom part, a square, represents the mouth or a person's oral pronouncements—fitting for someone in authority who gives commands and speaks with power. The top part is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, without contributing to its meaning itself. Over time, the character came to mean "you" or "ruler" because addressing someone directly, especially a person of higher status or authority, is how you would speak to such a figure.
Components
- 尹
- 口
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 30
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #947 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0541B