Kǒu 口
The character for ‘mouth’ and ‘opening’, and radical 30 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for eating, calling out and other uses of the mouth are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 口 as ‘mouth; open end; entrance, gate’. 吃 ‘eat; drink’ and 叫 ‘cry, shout; hail, greet, call’ are filed under it. Mandarin reads it kǒu; Japanese, kuchi.
Origin and history
Wieger’s entry is short: “It represents the mouth. Mouth, entrance.” John Chalmers, whose Account of the Structure of Chinese Characters came out in 1882, called it “one of the commonest forms in the language”, and added that “it is chiefly important as a radical”.
The mouth and the enclosure
A larger box drawn round a whole character is a different radical: 囗, number 31, the enclosure. 國 ‘nation, country’ and its simplified form 国 are filed there, not under 口. Wieger made the enclosure the radical of “characters relating to enclosures”, “To be distinguished” from the mouth. The small 口 also sits at the foot of 言, speech.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsXīn 心The character for ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, and radical 61 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for thought and feeling are filed.
- The same shape in Historical flagsBartholomew Roberts’s flagThe jack of the Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts (killed 1722): a black flag showing Roberts himself holding a flaming sword, standing on two skulls marked ABH and AMH, for “a Barbadian’s and a Martinican’s Head”.
See also
Yán 言, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Shǒu 手, Mù 目.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+53E3, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+5403, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+53EB, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+570B, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 18 (Han), The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 18: East Asia, Unicode Consortium, 18.1.8 Radical-Stroke Indices; 18.1.14 Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement
- Chinese Characters (Léon Wieger, 1927), Léon Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification, translated by L. Davrout, second edition (1927), Catholic Mission Press, Hsien-hsien (Internet Archive full text), Lessons 72 A and 74 A
- An Account of the Structure of Chinese Characters (John Chalmers, 1882), John Chalmers, An Account of the Structure of Chinese Characters under 300 Primary Forms (1882), Trübner & Co., London (Internet Archive full text), No. 72
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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