字の旅3,000 years in three forms
Bronze · Spring and AutumnSpring and Autumn · 770–476 BCE秦公鎛, 集成00268
Bronze: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Small seal: Academia Sinica 小學堂, CC0. Today’s form: KanjiVG, CC BY-SA 3.0.
部首Radical · in Communication & Thought
音
音 sound, noise
おと oto
9 strokesRadical of 3 kanjiPart of 6
Your ink in 音0% painted · 0 of 3 familiar
Origin · sourced
Ideogram指事
Based on the structure of 言, with an additional short horizontal stroke inside the 口 (“mouth”), forming a shape similar to 甘. The Shuowen Jiezi describes the structure as 从言含一 ("from 言 containing 一").
Source: Wiktionary, 音 (rev. 92736633), CC BY-SA 4.0
Memory story · made up to help you remember
“A sound emerging from the silence! Unlike 'speech' which is about people's words, 'sound' represents everything audible—the music of a flute, the rumble of thunder, or the gentle echoes in a mountain valley. It is the resonance of the universe catching our ear.”
Where it sits in a kanji
Indicates sounds, noise, music, rhymes, or phenomena that can be heard but not necessarily understood as words
育つ
What it grows into
Built from 音, with sourced origins
- 響echoキョウ · ひびく
鄉sound + 音
Phono-semantic compound · Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0
一覧
Every kanji with 音 as its radical
Most used first