Meaning & readings
cylinder, pipe, tube, gun barrel, sleeve
On’yomi トウ
Kun’yomi つつ
Origin
Bamboo grows naturally as hollow tubes, so the character combines the bamboo radical at the top to indicate it's made from bamboo, with a sound-hint component below that suggests the pronunciation. The combination makes sense because bamboo tubes were historically the most common cylinder-shaped objects in East Asia, and the character evolved to describe any similar hollow tube or pipe. Over time the meaning expanded to include related objects like gun barrels and sleeves, anything with a tubular or hollow shape.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 12
- Kangxi radical
- 118
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1631 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07B52