Meaning & readings
eyeball
Origin
The character 眼 combines the radical 目, which means eye and depicts the organ itself, with the component 艮 on the right side. The 艮 component serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character (it contributes to the reading ガン), rather than adding to the meaning. Together, the eye radical paired with this sound indicator created a character that specifically refers to the eyeball or the eye as a whole, distinguishing it from simpler eye-related characters.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Components
- 目
- 艮
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 109
- Grade
- Grade 5 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1527 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+0773C