Meaning & readings
rain
On’yomi ウ
Kun’yomi あめ、あま-、-さめ
Origin
The character 雨 is a picture of rain falling from the sky. The top horizontal line represents clouds, and the four short vertical strokes below represent raindrops falling downward. This simple pictographic image directly captures the visual appearance of rainfall, which is why the character naturally came to mean "rain." Over time, the shape was standardized into the form we use today, but it still preserves that basic visual idea of water falling from above.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Pictographic or simple.
Components
This character is treated as a single, undivided shape (雨).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 173
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #950 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+096E8