Meaning & readings
day, sun, Japan, counter for days
On’yomi ニチ、ジツ
Kun’yomi ひ、-び、-か
Nanori あ、あき、いる、く、くさ、こう、す、たち、に、にっ、につ、へ
Origin
This character is a simple picture of the sun. The four strokes form a square or circle with a dot in the middle, representing the sun's disk with a bright center. Because the sun appears once each day and marks time, the character came to mean both "sun" and "day." It's one of the oldest and most basic Chinese characters, and over time it also became used to represent Japan itself, since Japan is called "the land of the rising sun."
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Pictographic or simple.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (日).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 4
- Kangxi radical
- 72
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+065E5