Meaning & readings
texture, skin, body, grain
On’yomi キ
Kun’yomi はだ
Origin
The kanji 肌 combines the radical 月, which represents flesh or the body, with the component 几 on the right, which serves as a sound hint suggesting the character's pronunciation. The 月 radical makes sense for a word about skin and texture since skin is part of the body's surface. Over time, this character came to mean not just the physical body but also the texture and grain of a surface, as skin has a particular quality or feel to it.
Components
- 月
- 几
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 6
- Kangxi radical
- 130
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1559 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+0808C