字の旅3,000 years in four forms
Oracle bone · ShangShang · c. 1200 BCE佚55
Oracle bone and bronze: Wikimedia Commons, traced from Academia Sinica, CC0. Small seal: Academia Sinica 小學堂, CC0. Today’s form: KanjiVG, CC BY-SA 3.0.
部首Radical · in Nature & Elements
雨 rain (top radical)
あめかんむり amekanmuri
8 strokesRadical of 13 kanjiPart of 14
Origin · sourced
Pictogram象形
Source: Wiktionary, 雨 (rev. 93473045), CC BY-SA 4.0
Memory story · made up to help you remember
“When the 'rain' kanji sits on top of another character, it squishes down like a heavy cloud. It's like a storm hovering over the rest of the kanji, flavoring the meaning with weather, moisture, and the power of the sky.”
Where it sits in a kanji
Adds a weather-related context or atmospheric condition to the base character
What it grows into
- 雲cloudウン · くも
雨 + 云sound
Originally written 云, with the 雨 radical added to 云 to distinguish from the borrowed sense of “to speak”.
Ideogrammic compound · Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0
- 電electricityデン
雨 + 申sound
Phono-semantic compound (形聲): semantic 雨 (“rain”) + phonetic 申; also ideogrammic compound (會意): 雨 + 申 (“lightning”).
Phono-semantic compound · Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0
- 雪snowセツ · ゆき
雨 + 彗sound
Ancient simplification of 䨮, which is in turn phono-semantic compound (形聲): semantic 雨 (“rain”) + phonetic 彗.
Phono-semantic compound · Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0
Every kanji with 雨 as its radical
All 13 kanji