月

月 (月, X6708) is Unicode character, KanjiLiberal, CJK .

Glyph 月 (X6708) can easily be confused with
Glyph ⽉ (X2F49) .
None of these glyphs (nor characters) are allowed in technical language Tarja.

In Japanese, 月 may mean Moon or month: name of month or unit of time.
In Japanese, 月 may sound つき, tsuki or がつ, gatsu, or げつ, getsu.
Character and glyph 月 can also have other meanings and pronunciations depending on the context.

月: つき, tsuki

月: がつ, gatsu

Confusion

Some glyphs cause confusions. These confusions make learning Japanese more difficult - especially while neither teachers nor textbooks alert about this dirty tricks on the side of font designers. These tricks easily trump the users.

Even a native Japanese speaker, looking at characters ⽉ and 月, is unlikely to guess:
Which of them is ⽉ X2F49 ?
Which of them is 月 X6708 ?

These glyphs and characters are not allowed in technical language Tarja; it is Japanese-based slang with excluded ambiguous glyphs (and corresponding characters).

At the translation of 月 from Japanese to Tarja, words X6708 or month (がつ, gatsu) or moon ( つき, tsuki) can be used depending on the context.

In sci-fi «Tartaria», the standard default font «Uniglif» is mentioned; in that font, all the 2-byte and 3-byte characters have different glyphs, and each glyph has unique encoding. With Uniglif, there is no confusion mentioned above. The Uniglif is developed in order to stop spreading of Tarja and save the natural Chinese and Japanese languages from vulgarization with the ascii transliterations and words borrowed from other languages.

In the real life, the apparent sabotage of the font designers is observed.
As of 2026, at various operational systems, in the default font, many popular glyphs still have no unique Unicode number reserved.
As the result, many visually similar glyphs correspond to different Unicode characters, or are rendered identically by some fonts.
This sabotage is interpreted as a defect of the computer support of Japanese and Chinese languages. This fault pushes a researcher to use Tarja instead of Japanese for technical and educational texts.

du.t

While the fantastic Uniglif is not available,
the quick analysis of the confusion characters can be performed with the PHP dumping routine «du.t».

For the two confused Kanji above, the call may be the following:

php du.t "⽉ and 月"

It returns the Unicode numbers of the input characters and their Unicode encodings.

However, for a single character, site util.unicode can do the same job.

Moon radical vs Meat radical

Some kanji contain a component that looks like 月 but actually represents the meat radical ⺼.

Examples:
脳 // No // brain
腕 // ude // arm
膝 // hiza // knee

Examples

月 as satellite or source of light

月はきれいです。 // Tsuki wa kirei des.// The moon is beautiful. (see picture at the fop)

日本語でも「（惑星）の月」という呼び方で、月にかぎらず、各惑星等の衛星全般を指すこともある。
Nihongo demo 「 (wakusei) no tsuki」 to iu yobikata de, tsuki ni kagirazu, kaku wakusei-tō no eisei zenpan o sasu koto mo aru.
In Japanese, the term "(planetary) moon" is sometimes used, referring not only to the Moon but to all satellites of planets and other celestial bodies.

月 as time interval

1ヶ月 // ikkagetsu // one month (time interval)

これは大変な仕事だ。1ヶ月かかるだろう。//
Kore wa taihen na shigotoda. Ikkagetsu kakarudarou. //
This is a tough job. It will probably take a month.

When 月 means a period of time, the reading often becomes げつ (-getsu).

Examples:

Expression Sound Meaning
一ヶ月 (いっかげつ) one month
三ヶ月 (さんかげつ) three months
六ヶ月 (ろっかげつ) six months

Specifying the day of a week

月曜日 // げつようび // Monday ( Characters involved are: 月 曜 日)

Kanji 月 appears at the beginning of the table:

Key	Kanji	Hiragana	Romaji	English	meaning/mnenonic
月	月曜日	げつようび	getsuyoubi	Monday	Moon
火	火曜日	かようび	kayoubi	Tuesday	Fire, Mars
水	水曜日	すいようび	Suiyoubi	Wednesday	Water, Mercury
木	木曜日	もくようび	mokuyoubi	Thursday	Tree, Jupiter
金	金曜日	きんようび	kinyoubi	Friday	Gold, Venus
土	土曜日	どようび	doyoubi	Saturday	Ground, Saturn
日	日曜日	にちようび	nichiyoubi	Sunday	Enjoy, relax, Sun

In the last line of the table, character X65E5 日 appears twice, at the beginning and at the end of word 日曜日.

Names of months and reuse of the glyph

Narrowed Glyph 月 may appear as part of a more complicated glyph of another Kanji.

Names of months of a year are:

01月 X32C0 ㋀ いちがつ	January
02月 X32C1 ㋁ にがつ	February
03月 X32C2 ㋂ さんがつ	March (see second picture at the top)
04月 X32C3 ㋃ しがつ	April
05月 X32C4 ㋄ ごがつ	May
06月 X32C5 ㋅ ろくがつ	June
07月 X32C6 ㋆ しちがつ	July
08月 X32C7 ㋇ はちがつ	August
09月 X32C8 ㋈ くがつ	September
10月 X32C9 ㋉ じゅうがつ	October
11月 X32CA ㋊ じゅういちがつ	November
12月 X32CB ㋋ じゅうにがつ	December

Example:
私は三月に日本へ行きます。
Watashi wa sangatsu ni Nihon e ikimasu.
I will go to Japan in March.

明 looks as combination of two glyphs 日月; they may refer to Sun and Moon.
Glyph 明 may mean light, bright, light, brilliant; clear and can be pronounced as メイ, ⁠ミョウ, ⁠ミン,⁠ベイ, ⁠ボウ, ⁠あかり, ⁠あかるい, ⁠あかるむ, ⁠あからむ, あきらか, ⁠あける, あく, あくる, あかす, ⁠ひかり, akari.

More cases of reuse of the glyph are mentioned above in subsection "Moon radical vs Meat radical".

Jisho

https://jisho.org/search/月

つき 月

Noun 1. Moon​

うちゅうせん は つき を まわ る きどう はずれ ている。

宇宙船は 月を まわ 回る 軌道を 外れている。

The spaceship is out of orbit around the moon.

Noun 2. month​

かれ は つき に３０ まん えん かせ ぐ。

彼は 月に３０ 万 円 稼ぐ。

He earns 300,000 yen a month.

Noun 3. moonlight​

Noun 4. (a) moon; natural satellite See also 衛星

げつ 月

Noun 1. Monday​ Abbreviation, See also 月曜

げつようび

月曜日

Acknowledgement

This article was improved with assistance from ChatGPT.

Notes by ChatGPT

The **Uniglif / Tarja** concept is interesting, but it might be clearer if separated:

Possible structure:
1 Kanji 月
2 Meanings
3 Readings
4 Unicode details
5 Examples
6 Confusable characters
7 Fictional systems (Tarja / Uniglif)

Currently it mixes **linguistics, Unicode, and fiction**, which can confuse readers.

My updated rating would now be about: 9 / 10 for a technical wiki article.

References

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/月 月（つき、英: Moon、羅: Luna、独: Mond、仏: Lune）は、地球で唯一の安定的に存在する[[天\\然の衛星である（地球のその他の衛星については、「月以外の地球の衛星」を参照）。

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/月_(暦) 月（つき、がつ、げつ、英: month）は、時間の単位の一つ。年と日の中間にある単位で[1]、一年を12分した日数である[2]。現在世界で標準的に用いられるグレゴリオ暦[3]は、修正元のユリウス暦の月を汲み、1か月の日数は30もしくは31日を基本とし、2月のみ通常（平年）は28日、400年間に97回ある閏年には29日としている[4][5]。 ..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_130 Not to be confused with Radical 74 (月 "moon"). The side radical of Radical 130 is written as ⺼.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_74 Not to be confused with Radical 130, the "meat radical", where the side radical is written as ⺼. // Radical 74 (U+2F49) ..

https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=2EBC ⺼ 2EBC CJK RADICAL MEAT Han Script confuse: none

2025.05.27. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b05620/ Body Language: Kanji with the Meat-Moon Radical (月) Language Culture May 27, 2025 Richard Medhurst All kinds of Japanese words for parts of the body have kanji with the “meat-moon” radical, including the brain (脳), shoulders (肩), knees (膝), and arms (腕). The “meat-moon” radical 月 can be found in many kanji[ connected with the body. It gets its name (nikuzuki in Japanese), because these characters are associated with niku, meat or flesh (肉), but their radical—a simplified form of the character—is the same as tsuki, “moon” (月). Once, these two radicals were differentiated, but the similar appearance of 肉 and 月 when reduced in size as part of a kanji has led to 月 being used to represent both. ..

Keywords

«Character», «CJK», «Confusion», «Gatsu» «がつ», «Glyph», «[[]]», «Japanese», «Kanji», «KanjiLiberal», «KanjiRadical», «Month», «Moon», «Tarja», «Tsuki» «つき», «Unicode», «Uniglif», «X2F49» «⽉», «X6708» «月», «X660E» «明»,