Meaning & readings
curtain, bunting, act of play
On’yomi マク、バク
Kun’yomi とばり
Origin
The character 幕 combines two parts to express the idea of a curtain. The bottom component 巾 is a radical that represents cloth or fabric—it looks like a piece of woven material. The top component 莫 serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character. Together, they create a character that visually suggests cloth while guiding pronunciation, and over time this combination came to mean any kind of hanging fabric used to cover or conceal, like a theater curtain or tent fabric.
Components
- 莫
- 巾
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
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 50
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #835 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+05E55