Rì 日
The character for ‘sun’ and ‘day’, and radical 72 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for light and time are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 日 as ‘sun; day; daytime’. 明 ‘bright, light, brilliant; clear’, the sun beside the moon, and 時 ‘time, season; era, age, period’ (simplified 时) are filed under it. Mandarin reads it rì; Japanese, hi.
Origin and history
“It represents the sun,” Wieger wrote, and he made it the radical “of characters relating to the sun and times”.
日 and 曰
曰 ‘say’, radical 73, has the same four strokes as 日 and is printed lower and wider. Wieger described it as “To speak, to tell. The mouth” breathing out a word, and warned that in compounds it “is to be accurately distinguished” from the sun. 目, the eye, is taller still, with two lines inside instead of one.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsYuè 月The character for ‘moon’ and ‘month’, and radical 74 of the 214 Kangxi radicals.
- 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
Mù 目, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+65E5, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+660E, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+6642, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+66F0, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; 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), Lessons 143 A and 73 A
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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