Meaning & readings
rice, USA, metre
Origin
This character is a simple picture of rice grains. The four dots in the corners represent individual grains of rice, while the cross in the middle suggests the way rice is scattered or arranged. Over time, the picture became more abstract and geometric, but the basic idea stayed the same: a few strokes that look like rice particles clustered together. Because rice was such a central part of Japanese food and culture, the character naturally came to mean "rice" in general. The readings referring to America and metre are much newer additions, borrowed from the character's sound values used in modern Japanese.
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 (米).
Common words
- 外米 がいまい foreign rice
- 玄米 げんまい unpolished rice; unmilled rice
- 新米 しんまい new rice; first rice crop of the year
- 精米 せいまい rice polishing; polished rice
- 全米 ぜんべい all of the United States; the whole of the USA
- 南米 なんべい South America
- 日米 にちべい Japan and the United States; Japanese-American
- 白米 はくまい polished rice; (uncooked) white rice
Reference
- Strokes
- 6
- Kangxi radical
- 119
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #61 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+07C73