Meaning & readings
book, present, main, origin, real, counter for long cylindrical things
On’yomi ホン
Kun’yomi もと
Nanori まと、ごう
Origin
This character is a picture of a tree with its root emphasized. The horizontal line at the bottom represents the root system, while the vertical stroke and branches above show the trunk and foliage. Because a tree's root is its origin or foundation, the character came to mean "origin" and "main." From there, meanings like "real" and "present" developed, and it was later used as a counter for long, cylindrical objects like trees, pencils, or bottles, which share a similar shape to an actual tree trunk.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (本).
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 75
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #10 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+0672C