Meaning & readings
week
On’yomi シュウ
Origin
The character 週 combines two parts to represent "week." The left side is the radical for "walk" or "go around," which suggests the cyclical nature of time passing and repeating. The right component 周 serves as a sound hint, telling you roughly how to pronounce the character (as シュウ), rather than contributing to the meaning itself. Together, the idea of something that cycles and repeats—like days going around and around—pairs with this sound element to create a character meaning a seven-day period that recurs week after week.
Components
- 周
- ⻌
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
- 11
- Kangxi radical
- 162
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #540 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+09031