Reading
sixth earthly branch
여섯째 지지 사yeoseotjjae jiji sa
Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 여섯째 지지 (yeoseotjjae jiji) is the Korean for sixth earthly branch, and 사 (sa) is the reading. Say 여섯째 지지 사 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.
- Strokes
- 3
- Radical
- ⼰ 49
- Beyond radical
- 0
- Mandarin
- sì
- Japanese on
- shi
- Japanese kun
- mi
Vocabulary
Words that use 巳
Tap one to see what it means and how it's built. Every character in these words has its own page here.
None of the words 巳 forms are in the English dictionary this section uses, so each one shows its literal composition instead. That usually means the character survives mainly in names, dates and classical text rather than in everyday Korean.
Literal reading, not a dictionary entry
sixth earthly branch + year
Same sound, different character
15 characters are all read 사 (sa).
Korean has far more hanja than it has syllables, so one sound covers many characters. Write 사 in hangul and it could be any of these — the hanja is what says which one you mean. That is why hanja still turn up in dictionaries, newspaper headlines and legal writing, where guessing from context is not good enough.
All of them are written 사 in hangul.
Character data from the Unicode Unihan database. Korean reading, 훈음 and vocabulary from the libhangul hanja dictionary by Choe Hwanjin (BSD 3-Clause). English translations of whole words from kengdic (MPL 2.0 / LGPL 2.0+), a community dictionary — the occasional entry is wrong.Levels are derived, not official — they are not 한자능력검정시험 급수. The ordering combines Unihan’s kGradeLevel (the school year a character is introduced in Hong Kong, present on 1,539 of the 1,800), total stroke count, and how many national standards treat the character as core.