目
Meaning in Englisheye
Animated kanji stroke order
Related sentences
Word context
What it means
What does 目 mean? 目 (め, me) primarily refers to the physical organ for seeing and the general faculty of vision; in everyday Japanese it names the eye itself and the basic notion of visual perception, used as a concrete noun when talking about the body part or the act of seeing.
Main meanings
- 1. A grammatical suffix marking ordinal position (the "-th" element in a sequence).
- 2. An item or entry used to number points in a list or steps in instructions.
- 3. Attention or notice as an abstract focus in expressions that signal being observed or singled out.
- 4. A perspective, viewpoint, or role within a broader context (used to indicate a particular stance or aspect).
How to use it
Used across medical, everyday, literary and technical contexts: as a simple noun for the body part in casual and neutral speech, as an ordinal suffix to mark order in lists, and inside compounds to denote goal, target or focus in both formal writing and conversation; appears in idiomatic and figurative expressions to indicate attention, viewpoint, or being watched.
Variants and close terms
- 眼 (がん / まなこ, gan / manako) — eye (often anatomical or literary nuance)
- 視 (し, shi) — vision, seeing (focus on visual function rather than the organ)
- 目次 (もくじ, mokuji) — table of contents (related use as list marker)
Composition
The character is a pictograph: its strokes schematically depict the shape of an eye with an outline and a line suggesting the pupil or gaze; as a single-character word the kanji itself conveys the concrete object and its visual function without internal multi-kanji composition.
Etymology
目 (me) has a native Japanese kun reading me and Sino-Japanese on readings moku / boku; the on readings descend from Middle Chinese *muk and reflect standard phonetic borrowing patterns when kanji were imported into Japanese.
Origin
The concept and character arrived with Chinese writing from the continental mainland during the early classical period (roughly 5th–8th centuries); the glyph originally functioned as a pictograph for the eye in Chinese writing and was adopted into Japanese writing and vocabulary, then broadened into grammatical and metaphorical roles over subsequent centuries.
Word class
noun, suffix (名詞、接尾辞)