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Character
家
Strokes10
Radical宀
HSK1
FrequencyVery common — among the 60 most frequent characters in modern Chinese.
家 means home, family, or household, and it is one of the first characters a learner meets — in 我家 (my home), 回家 (go home), 家人 (family members) and 国家 (country). It also works as a suffix for specialists (专家 expert, 作家 writer) and as a measure word for shops, restaurants and companies.
Mandarinjiā · ㄐㄧㄚ
Cantonesegaa1 · gā
Pronounced neutral in 人家 (rénjia) and 大家 when unstressed in fast speech; the base reading is always first tone.
suffixa specialist or practitioner: 画家 painter, 科学家 scientist
measure wordfor businesses and establishments: 一家饭馆 a restaurant, 三家公司 three companies
nouna school of thought or lineage, as in 儒家 the Confucians, 百家 the hundred schools
Other pronunciations
jie · gaa1 An unstressed colloquial suffix in northern Mandarin, as in 整天家 (all day long) or 姑娘家 (a girl, being a girl). Rare and dialectal; learners can safely ignore it.
How it is built
compound ideograph or phono-semantic (disputed)
Radical 宀. roof, dwelling.
宀meaning a roof; marks the character as being about a building or dwelling
豕both a pig; either the animal kept in the house, or a phonetic element related to 豭 jiā 'boar' — scholars disagree
Origin
Oracle-bone and bronze forms already show a roof (宀) with a pig (豕) underneath, so the shape is old and stable. The traditional explanation is that a settled household kept pigs indoors or beneath the floor, so 'pig under a roof' meant a home. Many modern scholars instead read 豕 as a sound component, pointing to 豭 (jiā, 'boar'), which would make 家 an ordinary phono-semantic character. The question is genuinely unsettled; both accounts are standard in the literature.
Remembering it
A roof (宀) with a pig (豕) under it — where the family and its livestock live. Whether the pig was really a pig or just a sound hint, the picture is the easiest way to hold the ten strokes together.
After 我/你/他, 家 usually needs no 的: say 我家 rather than 我的家 for 'my home'. As a measure word it counts businesses (一家银行), not buildings — a house as a structure is 一栋房子. In Cantonese, everyday 'home' is often 屋企 (uk1 kei2) rather than 家, though 家 appears freely in compounds like 家人, 家庭, 國家, and 家吓/家陣 (gaa1 haa5, 'now').
Context
家 carries the weight of the Chinese family ideal: 成家 means to start a family (i.e. to marry), 传家 to pass something down the generations, and 家和万事兴 ('when the family is harmonious, everything prospers') is a common wall scroll. The philosophical 'hundred schools' of the Warring States — 儒家, 道家, 法家 — all use 家 to mean a lineage of teaching.
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This page was written by an AI language model and may contain errors, particularly in etymology. Check anything you plan to rely on.
A reference page for every character and common word we have
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