Meaning & readings
room, apartment, chamber, greenhouse, cellar
Origin
The character 室 combines a roof symbol at the top, which suggests an enclosed space or building, with a sound component at the bottom that hints at how to pronounce it. The roof radical 宀 classifies this as a word about structures or indoor spaces, while the bottom part 至 provides a phonetic clue to the character's pronunciation. Together, these parts create a character that pictures a roofed enclosure—literally a room or chamber. This structure-based approach to writing helped organize thousands of Chinese characters by category while allowing the sound component to guide pronunciation.
Components
- 宀
- 至
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
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 40
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #550 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+05BA4