Meaning & readings
sea, ocean
On’yomi カイ
Kun’yomi うみ
Nanori あ、あま、うな、うん、え、か、た、ひろ、ひろし、ぶ、まち、まま、み、め、わたる
Origin
The character 海 combines water (the left-side component 氵, which classifies this as a word about liquids) with the sound component 毎 on the right, which hints at the pronunciation. The water radical makes sense because the sea is, fundamentally, a large body of water. The sound component doesn't tell you what the sea is—it just guides you toward how to say the word. Together, these parts create a character that visually reminds you of water while phonetically anchoring the pronunciation to readers and learners.
Components
- 氵
- 毎
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
- 9
- Kangxi radical
- 85
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #200 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+06D77