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| 收 | |
| Simplified | 收 (unchanged) |
|---|---|
| Japanese form | 収 |
| Meaning | receive; collect; gather in |
| Radical | 攴 / 攵 (strike) — Kangxi 66 |
| Strokes | 6 (収: 4) |
| Unicode | U+6536 |
| Pronunciation | |
| Mandarin | shōu |
| Cantonese | sau1 |
| Japanese | shū; osa-meru, osa-maru |
| Korean | su (수) |
| Vietnamese | thu |
收 (pronounced shōu in Mandarin) is a Chinese character meaning to receive, to collect, to gather in, and — by extension — to bring something to a close. It is one of the workhorse characters of everyday East Asian vocabulary, sitting inside the ordinary words for income, harvest, storage, absorption, recycling, and a receipt.
The character has an unusually tidy history. Its earliest recorded sense was "to arrest" or "to seize," and every later meaning can be traced from that starting point through a single idea: bringing something in and holding onto it. What is seized becomes what is gathered, what is gathered becomes what is harvested, and what is harvested becomes what is received. The sense of closing something off — packing up, wrapping up, shutting the shop — is the same motion pointed at a task rather than an object.
Unlike many common characters, 收 was not altered by the mainland Chinese simplification reforms of the 1950s, so mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong all write it identically. Japan, however, adopted a shortened form, 収, which is the character most Japanese readers will recognize.
The senses of 收 fan out from a single physical image: taking hold of something and pulling it in.
The oldest recorded meaning of 收 is to arrest, capture, or take into custody. This is the sense the character was built to write, and it survives today in legal and administrative vocabulary across the region — Chinese 沒收 (mòshōu, "to confiscate"), Korean 압수 (押收, apsu, "seizure of evidence"), Japanese 押収 (ōshū, the same legal act).
The connection to the modern everyday meaning is closer than it looks. Confiscating property, collecting a debt, and gathering a crop are all the same gesture performed on different objects.
From seizing came the sense of gathering in, and specifically of bringing in a crop. This became one of the character's most productive meanings. Classical Chinese pairs the four seasons with four agricultural verbs in a well-known formula — 春生夏長，秋收冬藏, "in spring things are born, in summer they grow, in autumn they are gathered, in winter they are stored" — and 收 is the autumn term.
Modern Chinese keeps this alive in 秋收 (qiūshōu, "the autumn harvest") and in 收穫 / 收获 (shōuhuò), which means a harvest literally but is used far more often in a figurative sense: the gains, takeaways, or payoff from any effort. A student finishing a difficult course, a traveler returning from a trip, or a reader closing a good book will all describe having had 收穫.
The most common everyday sense is simply to receive: to get a letter, accept a payment, take delivery of a parcel. This is the meaning behind 收到 (shōudào, "to have received"), the standard acknowledgment in Chinese business messaging, roughly equivalent to a spoken "got it."
Extended slightly, the same sense covers taking in money as an institution — charging fees, levying taxes, generating revenue — and taking in signals, which is why 收 supplies the vocabulary of broadcasting: a radio is a 收音機 / 收音机 (shōuyīnjī), literally a "sound-receiving machine."
The internal, non-physical version of this is absorption. 吸收 (xīshōu) covers everything from a sponge absorbing water to a body absorbing nutrients to a student absorbing new material.
If you receive something, you then have to put it somewhere. 收 accordingly carries the sense of stowing, tidying, and storing: 收拾 (shōushi, "to tidy up"), 收藏 (shōucáng, "to collect" in the sense of art or stamps), 收納 / 收纳 (shōunà, "storage" as an organizing concept).
收拾 has a well-worn colloquial second life. Applied to a person rather than a room, it means to deal with someone — to sort them out, with a clear implication of punishment. "等我收拾你" is a threat, not an offer to help clean.
Finally, 收 describes wrapping something up. 收工 (shōugōng) is to knock off work for the day; 收場 / 收场 (shōuchǎng) is how a situation ends, usually badly; 收尾 (shōuwěi) is to tie off the loose ends of a project.
Cantonese leans on this sense harder than Mandarin does, using 收 on its own for a shop shutting for the day. The underlying image is consistent with everything above: at closing time, you gather the goods in off the street.
收 is a phono-semantic compound — a character combining one element that points at the meaning with another that points at the sound. It is written 丩 on the left and 攵 on the right.
The phonetic element is a small puzzle. Formally, 丩 is there for its sound rather than its sense — but its own meaning of binding and entangling sits so comfortably next to a character meaning "to arrest" that the pairing is hard to read as pure accident. Standard analyses classify it as phonetic only, and the resemblance is best treated as a resonance rather than as part of the character's construction.
A modern reader will find the phonetic claim hard to credit, because two thousand years of sound change have pulled the two characters apart. In Mandarin, 丩 is jiū and 收 is shōu. In Korean they are 구 (gu) and 수 (su). Nothing in either pair suggests a shared sound.
The connection is easier to see further back. In Middle Chinese the two were kjuw and syuw — an identical rhyme, differing only in the initial consonant. That difference then widened as each language went its own way, and Mandarin added a further twist by palatalizing k before a front glide, turning the k of 丩 into a j. The rhyme that once made the pairing obvious is still there underneath; it is the beginnings of the syllables that drifted.
Old Chinese reconstructions give 收 two readings, distinguished by tone, with the second corresponding to the noun sense of a harvest as opposed to the verb sense of gathering one. This distinction was lost as the tone system evolved, and Mandarin has a single reading today.
Japan's postwar script reforms produced shinjitai ("new character forms"), simplified versions of many kanji. 收 became 収, in which the 攵 element on the right is replaced by 又, a simpler shape derived from a picture of a hand.
The substitution drops the character from six strokes to four and, more consequentially for dictionaries, moves it to a different radical: 収 is filed under 又 (Kangxi radical 29) rather than 攴. It is a sixth-grade character in the Japanese school curriculum, so it is learned by every Japanese student.
Japanese readers encounter 収 in every modern context; 收 appears only in older texts, calligraphy, proper nouns, and material printed in Chinese or Korean. Korea and Taiwan kept the original form.
收 is U+6536, a CJK Unified Ideograph. Unlike some heavily duplicated characters, it has no compatibility encodings — no alternate code points exist for round-tripping legacy national character sets. Text containing 收 survives Unicode normalization untouched.
The Japanese form 収 is U+53CE, a separate CJK Unified Ideograph in its own right. This surprises people who expect the two to share one code point the way regional variants of many characters do. The reason is the same principle that keeps 漢 and 汉 apart: Han unification merges glyph shapes that are stylistic variations of one structure, but 收 and 収 differ in an actual component, swapping 攵 for 又. That is a structural difference, not a font difference, so the two get separate encodings.
The practical consequence is that converting between them is a text-conversion job, not a matter of choosing a Japanese font. A search for 収 will not match 收 unless the search system has been built to fold the two together.
| Language | Reading | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mandarin Chinese | shōu | First tone; the standard reading in mainland China and Taiwan |
| Cantonese | sau1 | Used in Hong Kong and Guangdong Province |
| Japanese (on'yomi) | shū (しゅう) | The kan-on reading, used in nearly all compounds; an older go-on reading su (す) survives only in a few fossilized words |
| Japanese (kun'yomi) | osa-meru (収める), osa-maru (収まる) | Native Japanese verbs written with the character |
| Korean | su (수) | Traditionally taught with the gloss 거둘 수 (geodul su), "the su that means to gather" |
| Vietnamese | thu | A secondary reading thâu appears in older texts |
收 is among the most frequently used characters in written Chinese. A selection of common compounds:
A commonly quoted proverb builds on the harvest sense: 一分耕耘，一分收穫 — a measure of effort brings a measure of harvest, the Chinese equivalent of "you reap what you sow."
Written 収, the character is extremely common in formal and business Japanese:
The native reading osameru creates a classic difficulty for learners, because four different kanji are read the same way and are distinguished only by meaning:
| Spelling | Sense | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 収める | to put away; to obtain, to achieve | 成功を収める — to achieve success |
| 納める | to deliver, to pay in | 税金を納める — to pay taxes |
| 治める | to govern; to quell | 国を治める — to rule a country |
| 修める | to master, to cultivate | 学問を修める — to pursue learning |
Read su (수), 收 appears in a large stock of Sino-Korean vocabulary. Because it is written in hangul in ordinary text, its presence is invisible unless you know the hanja:
Two of these are exact hangul homophones of unrelated words, which is a standard hazard of Sino-Korean vocabulary. 수입 is both 收入 ("income") and 輸入 ("imports"); 수습 is both 收拾 ("damage control") and 修習 ("training, apprenticeship"). Context does the disambiguating, and formal documents occasionally fall back on printing the hanja in parentheses.
Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet today, but its Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary preserves 收 as thu: thu nhập (收入, income), thu hoạch (收穫, harvest), thu thập (收集, to collect), tiếp thu (接收, to take in or absorb).
One coincidence is worth flagging. Mùa thu means "autumn," and given that 收 is the character of the autumn harvest, the two look like they should be connected. They are not — the thu in mùa thu is 秋, an entirely different character that happens to share a Sino-Vietnamese reading.
This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — reconstructed Old Chinese phonology, the complete range of dialectal readings, exhaustive compound lists, and classical citations — can consult the Wiktionary entry:
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