Meaning & readings
land, six
On’yomi リク、ロク
Kun’yomi おか
Nanori くが、たち、みち、む、むつ
Origin
The character 陸 combines the earth radical on the left, which signals the character relates to land or ground, with a sound component on the right that hints at how to pronounce it. The earth radical makes sense because 陸 means land or an expanse of solid ground, as opposed to water. Over time, this character also picked up the meaning "six" in Japanese, likely through a sound association rather than anything to do with its visual shape.
Components
- ⻖
- 坴
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
- 170
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 4 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #736 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+09678