Explore each form from the oldest known stage to today.
Historical forms are not available yet. The current form is shown as a reference.
The kanji "掃" is a phono-semantic compound, formed during the Warring States period in China. Its structure consists of a semantic component and a phonetic component. The left radical, 扌 (hand), clearly indicates an action performed with the hand. The right component, 帚, is the ancient character for "broom" (houki), a pictograph depicting a hand holding a bundle of twigs used for sweeping. While 帚 alone could imply the act of sweeping, the addition of the hand radical 扌 was likely to reinforce the verbal action and to distinguish it from the noun "broom." The character 帚 also functions as the phonetic element, providing the approximate pronunciation "sō" to the compound character. Historically, the character evolved from earlier forms found on bronze inscriptions and seal script, where the pictographic nature of the broom (帚) was more visually apparent. It was standardized into its current form during the clerical script transformation in the Han Dynasty. The kanji, along with the vast majority of the Chinese writing system, was introduced to Japan in waves, primarily through Korean intermediaries and later directly from China, from around the 5th century AD. It was systematically adopted into the Japanese writing system and is part of the standard set of characters (Jōyō Kanji). A key linguistic note is the relationship between "掃" and its phonetic component "帚". In modern Japanese, 帚 is read as "hōki" for "broom," while the verb "to sweep" is "haku" (掃く). The On'yomi reading "sō" comes from the original Chinese pronunciation and is used in compounds like "sōji" (掃除, cleaning). This demonstrates how a single etymological root (帚) gave rise to multiple, phonetically distinct words in Japanese, with the compound character "掃" specializing for the verbal action.