Meaning & readings
town, village, block, street
On’yomi チョウ
Kun’yomi まち
Origin
This character pictures a town or village as organized blocks of land. The left component, a square representing a rice field or agricultural plot, suggests the idea of land divided into useful sections. The right component is a sound hint that tells you roughly how to pronounce the character, not a clue to its meaning. Together, the character came to mean a town or village made up of distinct blocks or districts.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Common words
- 下町 したまち low-lying part of a city (usu. containing shops, factories, etc.)
- 町人 ちょうにん chōnin (Edo-period social class of town-dwelling commoners, esp. landowning merchants); townspeople
- 町村 ちょうそん towns and villages
- 町長 ちょうちょう town mayor
- 町内 ちょうない neighborhood; neighbourhood
- 町民 ちょうみん townsman; townswoman
- 同町 どうちょう the same town; that town
- 室町 むろまち Muromachi period (1336-1573)
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 102
- Grade
- Grade 1 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #292 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 3
- Unicode
- U+0753A