Meaning & readings
meat
On’yomi ニク
Kun’yomi しし
Origin
This character is a picture of meat or flesh. In its original form, the strokes represented a piece of meat or the muscle tissue of an animal, which is why it came to mean "meat" or "flesh" in general. The character is so directly connected to this meaning that it's used as a classifier in other kanji to indicate characters related to the body or body parts. Over time, the pictorial shape simplified into the modern form we see today, but it still carries that original visual idea.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (肉).
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 6
- Kangxi radical
- 130
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #986 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+08089