Meaning & readings
hand
On’yomi シュ、ズ
Kun’yomi て、て-、-て、た-
Origin
This character is a simple picture of a hand. The four strokes represent the palm and fingers in a simplified, stylized way—if you look at the shape, you can see something like an open palm with the fingers extending outward. Over thousands of years, the image became more abstract and geometric, but the basic idea stayed the same: the strokes still suggest the outline of a hand. Because hands are so useful and important in everyday life, this character became one of the most common ones in Japanese and Chinese writing.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (手).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 4
- Kangxi radical
- 64
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #60 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+0624B