Meaning & readings
somebody, person, one's station in life
On’yomi シン
Kun’yomi み
Origin
This character is a picture of a human body seen from the front. The strokes show a person standing upright, with the vertical line representing the spine and torso, and the horizontal and curved strokes suggesting the arms and legs. Over time, the shape became more stylized and geometric, but it still represents the basic outline of a body. Because a person's body is central to who they are, the character came to mean "person" or "body," and later extended to mean someone's position or station in life.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (身).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 158
- Formation type
- Pictographic or simple
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #320 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+08EAB