0077 忘

忘

This character means ‘to forget.’ The Japanese pronunciation is BŌ or wasureru. The Chinese pronunciation is wàng.

The lower figure is the familiar ‘heart, mind’ character, somewhat flattened to fit the space available. Here’s the character as it stands on its own:

心.

The upper figure,

亡,

means ‘perish, destroy, die, dead.’ It was really only put in to provide a clue to the sound of the word, but its meaning can be useful in remembering the character. Its early forms,

  ,

showed a man in a grave or someone going into a hiding place. Wieger says that the right-angled line represents a hiding place and that the upper figure is an early form of

入,

which means ‘to enter.’

All of this adds up to ‘perishing from the mind,’ meaning ‘to forget.’