Meaning & readings
linen, cloth, spread, distribute
On’yomi フ、ホ
Kun’yomi ぬの、し.く、きれ
Nanori う、の、ほ
Origin
The kanji 布 combines two parts: the component 巾, which is a picture of a piece of cloth or textile (it looks like a narrow rectangle), and 父, which serves as a sound hint for the character's pronunciation. The 巾 component grounds the character's meaning in fabric, while 父 tells you roughly how to say it. Over time, the character came to mean not just cloth itself, but also the actions of spreading or distributing cloth — and by extension, spreading or distributing things in general. The visual shape of the cloth radical was preserved even as the character's meanings expanded.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 50
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #877 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+05E03