Meaning & readings
eye, class, look, insight, experience, care, favor
Origin
This character is a simple picture of an eye. The two horizontal lines represent the upper and lower eyelids, while the vertical and horizontal lines in the middle represent the pupil and the opening of the eye. Because the eye is the organ of sight and perception, the character came to mean "eye" itself, and later extended to related meanings like "look," "insight," and "class" or "category" — since things are organized and distinguished by how we see and classify them. The character remains one of the most visually direct pictures in Japanese writing.
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 (目).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 5
- Kangxi radical
- 109
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #76 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+076EE