里 (lǐ): inside

Meanings

1 inside
2 in
3 within

Characters

里

lǐ

inside; inner

Examples

书包里有什么？

Shūbāo lǐ yǒu shénme?

What's inside the backpack?

房间里很安静。

Fángjiān lǐ hěn ānjìng.

It's very quiet inside the room.

Tips

grammar

里 is a location word placed after nouns to indicate 'inside': 家里 (at home), 学校里 (in school), 心里 (in one's heart). The opposite is 外 (wài, outside).

Components

semantic

田 tián

field; cultivated land

Top is 田, the field radical — pictograph of irrigated paddies divided by raised paths. Sits in slight stroke-contracted form (4 strokes here vs 5 standalone, the bottom horizontal merging into the structure below). 里 originally meant 'a settlement of fields' — a village. Same field appears in 男 man, 界 boundary.

semantic

土 tǔ

earth; soil

Bottom is 土, the earth radical — pictograph of a clod of earth on the ground. Field over earth gives the original meaning 'cultivated village land', from which came 'inside, lining, distance unit (a half-kilometer)'. The whole character is itself a Kangxi radical (#166), so neither 田 nor 土 is the indexing radical here.

Radical

Village Kangxi #166

The village/li-mile radical. An ideograph of 田 (field) over 土 (earth) — a settled hamlet of farmland and ground. Three meanings collide in modern 里: native sense 'village', traditional 里 (Chinese mile, ~500m), and simplified absorption of 裏 'inside' (the high-frequency location word). Indexes few characters (重, 量, 野 are the main ones, all classified here for shape).