Where the shape comes from
One old reading turns an eye back over a seated figure’s shoulder, a backward glance that stops rather than moves on — the picture behind its use for the Gen trigram, mountain, stillness, the hexagram line for a journey halted. The everyday word gěn, tough to chew, stubbornly blunt, keeps that same sense of something that will not give way. Mostly, though, it lends only its sound to characters like 银, silver, 很, very, and 恨, to hate.
汉字 filed under 艮
No published character on HSK Guide is filed under this radical yet. 汉字库.