Meaning & readings
revelation, tell, inform, announce
On’yomi コク
Kun’yomi つ.げる
Nanori い
Origin
This character combines a picture of a cow or ox (牛, top) with a mouth or opening (口, bottom). The idea is that the cow's mouth is used to make an announcement — when something is proclaimed out loud, it spreads like the sound from an animal's mouth. Over time, the character came to mean "to tell" or "announce" more broadly, representing the act of speaking something aloud so others will hear and know about 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
- Compound ideographic (combined meanings)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #188 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0544A