屋外
おくがい · okugai · JLPT N2 · noun
outdoors
🏞️ 屋外 = house + outside: the place beyond the roof
屋 (oku) means roof or house, and 外 (gai) means outside, as in 外国 gaikoku, foreign country. Anything past the roof of the house counts as outdoors. The opposite word is 屋内 okunai, indoors, where 内 means inside.
屋 — corpse 尸 + reach/arrive 至
屋 originally depicted a place where one arrives (至) to rest under a roof, with 尸 here representing a covering or dwelling rather than a corpse. The character came to mean 'house' or 'room'. Today it commonly refers to a house or a room within a building.
外 — evening 夕 + divination 卜
Originally a compound of 夕 (evening) and 卜 (divination). Ancient Chinese divinations were performed in the morning; doing them at evening (夕) was considered irregular or 'outside' the norm. From this sense of deviation, 外 came to mean 'outside' or 'external'.