Origin

This character is a simple picture of a piece of cloth or fabric hanging down. The three strokes form a rectangular shape that represents a bolt of cloth, a towel, or a hanging scroll. Because cloth was such a common and important material in everyday life, this simple image came to mean "cloth," "towel," and related concepts like "width" (the width of a bolt of fabric). The character is so fundamental to describing cloth-related objects that it became one of the main organizing categories, or radicals, used in dictionaries to group kanji together.

AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Pictographic or simple.