JapanesePod101.com Blog
Learn Japanese with Free Daily
Audio and Video Lessons!
Start Your Free Trial 6 FREE Features

More Fun with the Rain Radical

At least two compounds contain repetitions of , the rain radical (known as amekanmuri, 雨冠):

露霜 (tsuyujimo: frozen dew)      dew + frost

Frozen dew? Oh, that’s frost! This sample sentence from Breen explains that:

霜はが凍ったものだ。
Shimo wa tsuyu ga kōtta mono da.
Frost is frozen dew.

(shimo: frost)
(kō(ru): to freeze, be frozen over)

零露 (reiro: dripping dew)     to spill + dew

The first kanji is a bit of a mystery. You may have heard that rei is one way of saying “zero.” Well, is that “zero.” Halpern lists “zero” as the only meaning of this character, though Breen and Henshall contribute more definitions. Henshall says that once meant “falling rain,” which then broadened to mean “to fall.” The character also meant “raindrops” and evolved to mean “drop” in general. A drop is a tiny and nearly nonexistent thing, so in Japanese (but not in Chinese) came to mean “zero.” We’ll return to this idea next week as it applies to .

And then one compound provides twice in a whale-fish kind of way:

雨露 (uro: rain and dew)      rain + dew

Back to the Blog …