Meaning & readings
evening, twilight, season's end, livelihood, make a living, spend time
Origin
This character combines sun (日) with a sound hint (莫, which tells you roughly how to pronounce it). The sun setting or growing dim gave the character its basic meaning of "evening" or "twilight." From the idea of day's end, the meanings expanded to include the end of a season and eventually the broader sense of "livelihood" or "how one gets through life" — like passing through time the way day passes into night. The bottom component (sun) acts as a classifier that groups this character with other time-related kanji.
Components
- 莫
- 日
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
- 14
- Kangxi radical
- 72
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #978 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+066AE