Mù 木
The character for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’, and radical 75 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for trees and things of wood are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 木 as ‘tree; wood, lumber; wooden’. Two side by side make 林 ‘forest, grove’, and three make 森 ‘forest; luxuriant vegetation’; both are filed under 木. In Mandarin it is mù, the same sound as 目 ‘eye’; Japanese reads it ki.
Origin and history
Wieger saw a whole tree in the character: “On the top, the branches; at the bottom, the roots; in the middle, the trunk”. “By extension, wood,” he added, and he called it the radical “of characters relating to trees”.
A tree, a grove and a forest
林 is 木 with four strokes more, the second tree, and 森 is 木 with eight more, so a radical dictionary files both under radical 75. Two other plant radicals have pages here: grass, 艸, and bamboo, 竹.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsCǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
- Wood, 木, is one of the five elements of the Chinese calendarFive elements (wu xing)Wood, fire, earth, metal and water: the five phases (五行 wǔxíng) of Chinese thought, which describe how things change rather than what they are made of. In the Chinese calendar each year takes the element of its heavenly stem, and the element follows the year’s last digit: years ending in 6 and 7, such as 2026 and 2027, are Fire years.
See also
Zhú 竹, Mù 目, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+6728, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+6797, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+68EE, 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 119 A
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses or letters and numbers.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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