Meaning & readings

lips

On’yomi シン
Kun’yomi くちびる

Origin

The character 唇 combines two parts: the mouth radical 口 at the bottom, which directly represents the lips as a feature of the mouth, and 辰 above it, which serves as a sound hint rather than contributing to the meaning. The 辰 component doesn't mean anything related to lips—it's there because in Chinese, the character was pronounced similarly to how 辰 was pronounced. By pairing the meaningful mouth symbol with a sound guide, the character effectively represents both what lips are and how to pronounce the word.

唇 10 strokes

Components

  • 辰 sound hint top
  • 口 radical bottom

A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.

Common words

  • 下唇 したくちびる lower lip
  • 上唇 うわくちびる upper lip

Easily confused with

These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.

Reference

Strokes
10
Kangxi radical
30
Formation type
Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
Grade
Jōyō (secondary school)
Frequency rank
#1992 (newspapers)
Former JLPT
level 1
Unicode
U+05507