Mù 目
The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 目 as ‘eye; look, see; division, topic’. 看 ‘look, see; examine, scrutinize’ and 眼 ‘eye; eyelet, hole, opening’ are filed under it. Mandarin reads it mù, the same sound as 木 ‘tree’; Japanese, me.
Origin and history
Wieger traced the eye through three stages. “Firstly the socket with the two eyelids and the pupil; then the pupil was suppressed; lastly the character was placed straight in order to give room”: an eye lying on its side, stood upright to save room. He called it the radical “of characters relating to the eye and vision”.
目, 日 and 月
目 is a tall box with two lines inside; 日, the sun, has one; 月, the moon, is open at the bottom, its left side sweeping away. In 看 ‘look’ a hand is drawn over the eye, and the character is filed here, under 目.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsShuǐ 水The character for ‘water’, and radical 85 of the 214 Kangxi radicals: the one under which dictionaries file characters for rivers, seas and liquids.
- The same shape in Chinese mythology and symbolsDouble happiness (囍)囍, the character 喜 (xǐ, joy) written twice and joined into one sign, read shuangxi, “double happiness”. It is the sign of a Chinese wedding, pasted on the door and worked into the couple’s gifts and furnishings.
See also
Shǒu 手, Mù 木, Rì 日, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+76EE, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+770B, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+773C, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- 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), Lesson 158 A
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines 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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