Meaning & readings
hearth, furnace, kiln, reactor
On’yomi ロ
Kun’yomi いろり
Origin
The character combines fire (火) on the left, which establishes the meaning of something that burns or produces heat, with a sound hint (戸) on the right that suggests the pronunciation. The fire component makes sense because a hearth, furnace, or kiln is fundamentally a place where fire burns. By pairing fire with a phonetic guide, the character efficiently captures both what the object is and how it should be read aloud in Chinese, a system later inherited by Japanese.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 86
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1359 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+07089