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Kanji for Nose

The kanji most commonly used for "Nose" is 鼻.

Kanji that mean Nose

  • nose

    Also associated with beginning.

    Onyomi: bi Kunyomi: hana 14 strokes Jōyō

鼻 is the nose, and there is no competition for it. It reads hana on its own and bi in compounds: 鼻血 (nosebleed), 鼻音 (a nasal sound), 耳鼻咽喉科 (the ear, nose and throat clinic). It covers animal snouts as well as human noses.

Spoken Japanese has a trap here that writing does not. Hana is also 花, flower; the two are told apart by pitch accent and context, never on the page. 鼻 also carries the idiom 鼻が高い, literally “the nose is high,” meaning proud of oneself.

Before you use Nose kanji

There is no ambiguity to warn about — 鼻 simply means nose, which is the problem: standing alone it reads as a body-part label and lands closer to comic than to striking. If the nose is genuinely the point, a full word or phrase carries it better than the bare character.

Other meanings to explore

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