Meaning & readings
writing brush, writing, painting brush, handwriting
On’yomi ヒツ
Kun’yomi ふで
Nanori はじめ
Origin
The kanji 筆 combines bamboo at the top with the character 聿 below. Bamboo was the natural material used to make brush handles in ancient China and Japan, so it appears at the top as a classifier showing the object is made of bamboo. The bottom component 聿 is an old pictograph of a brush itself—the strokes show bristles gathered at one end. Together, these two parts create a character whose meaning draws directly from what it pictures: a bamboo-handled writing brush.
Components
- 竹
- 聿
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 118
- Formation type
- Compound ideographic (combined meanings)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1132 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07B46