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Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.

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But 口 also means "loophole", so 入口 means "entrance" is perfectly logical - "The loophole that allows you to enter another building/strucutre".

Fun coincidence:

A vomitorium (any modern person associates that with vomiting, i.e., stuff coming out of your mouth) was the name for entrances in Roman amphitheatres.

Entering the mouth of the building?

Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".

"Put your foot on it" means the accelerator / gas pedal, that seems very much equivalent.

I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.

put the pedal to the metal

(idiomatic) To exert maximum effort.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#En...

Yes, that is an equivalent phrase, but much less commonly used than 加油 and "gi' det gas".

I think the character does double service in that it has meanings which are very much mouth-related - 薄口 (thin-mouthed - like weak taste) 後口 (after-mouth - after taste); but it also has a ton of meanings which are like opening / spout / hole / crater.

http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/cgi-bin/wn-gridx.cgi?usrn...

It's not that a land's-mouth is a crater, more like, mouth and opening are more synonymous in feeling in Japanese.

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