血
Meaning in Englishblood
Animated kanji stroke order
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Word context
What it means
血 (chi) means "blood." It refers to the bodily fluid that circulates through animals and humans and serves as the basic lexical item in Japanese for bleeding, medical tests, and bodily substance; it also functions as the root for many compound terms in medical, social, and literary contexts.
Main meanings
- 1. Family ties or kinship — used metaphorically to indicate shared ancestry or blood relations.
- 2. Heredity or genetic descent — invoked when discussing lineage or inherited traits.
- 3. Passion, vigor, or temperament — describes spiritedness or hot-bloodedness in personality.
- 4. Violence or gore — used in literary or colloquial speech to denote bloodshed or injury.
- 5. Symbolic or ritual meanings — appears in symbolic contexts (sacrifice, rites) and in social concepts like blood type.
How to use it
Used across registers: in medical and scientific settings to name bodily fluids and diagnostic terms, in everyday speech to report injuries or family relations, and in literature and idioms to express temperament, lineage, or violent imagery; it appears both alone and as part of compounds, with formal use in technical compounds and more casual use in conversation and figurative expressions.
Variants and close terms
- 血液 (ketsueki) — blood (medical, scientific)
- 血縁 (ketsuen) — blood relation, kinship
- 血筋 (ketsuji) — bloodline, lineage
- 血潮 (chishio) — blood (poetic/archaic)
- 無血 (muketsu) — bloodless (used as an antonym in formal contexts)
Composition
The kanji is a pictographic-logographic character whose graphic elements suggest a vessel or wound above and droplets below, visually representing blood flow; the whole character functions as the radical that carries the semantic field of "blood."
Etymology
血 (chi) kun reading reflects an Old Japanese phoneme reconstructed as *ti preserved in historical kana; the Sino-Japanese (on) reading ketsu represents a Middle Chinese pronunciation that entered Japanese with Chinese lexical borrowings.
Origin
The concept of blood is ancient in Japan; the character 血 arrived with Chinese writing around the 5th–7th centuries and became established in medical, religious, and literary texts, appearing in classical poetry and early medical manuscripts as the primary sign for bodily blood and related ideas.
Word class
noun (名詞)