Meaning & readings
intestines, guts, bowels, viscera
Origin
The character 腸 combines two parts: the flesh radical on the left (月, which marks body-related terms) and a sound component on the right (昜) that suggests the pronunciation. The flesh radical clarifies that this character refers to something inside the body, while the right side hints at how to say the word. Together they depict the internal organs, specifically the intestines, which are a key part of the body's digestive system. This two-part structure was an efficient way to create characters where the shape tells you both what the word means and roughly how it sounds.
Components
- 月
- 昜
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Easily confused with
These look alike but are unrelated in meaning — check the stroke that differs.
Reference
- Strokes
- 13
- Kangxi radical
- 130
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 6 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #1807 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 1
- Unicode
- U+08178