Meaning & readings
say, word
On’yomi ゲン、ゴン
Kun’yomi い.う、こと
Nanori とき
Origin
The character 言 is a pictograph of a mouth with sound waves or breath coming out of it. The box shape represents the mouth, and the horizontal lines inside suggest the vibrations or flow of speech emerging from it. Over time, these lines simplified into the modern form, but the basic idea remains: a mouth producing words. This visual origin directly connects the character's shape to its meanings of "say" and "word."
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 (言).
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 7
- Kangxi radical
- 149
- Grade
- Grade 2 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #83 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 4
- Unicode
- U+08A00