Meaning & readings
sleep, die, sleepy
On’yomi ミン
Kun’yomi ねむ.る、ねむ.い
Nanori ね
Origin
This character shows an eye (目) combined with a sound hint (民, which helps indicate the pronunciation "min"). The pairing makes sense: when you're sleepy, your eyes start to close and droop. By adding the sound component 民 to the eye radical, the character came to mean sleep or sleepiness. The sound component doesn't add meaning itself — it just tells you roughly how to pronounce the word.
AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 10
- Kangxi radical
- 109
- Grade
- Jōyō (secondary school)
- Frequency rank
- #1315 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07720