映画館
えいがかん · eigakan · JLPT N5 · noun
cinema
🎬🍿 映画館 = 映画 (movie) + 館 (hall): a movie hall
映 means project or reflect, 画 means picture, so 映画 is a projected picture: a movie. 館 (kan) is a large public building, the same ending as 図書館 (library) and 美術館 (art museum). Eiga + kan = the building for movies.
映 — sun 日 + center 央 (phonetic)
映 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The sun radical 日 gives the meaning—light, shining, reflection—while 央 (yāng) supplies the sound, shifted to yìng. It originally described sunlight shining on something, and now broadly means 'reflect,' 'shine upon,' or 'project' (as in films).
画 — hand 一 + field 田 + frame 凵
Originally a pictograph of a hand holding a brush drawing boundaries around a field, depicting the act of marking out land. The top once showed a brush (聿), and 田 represents the field being divided. Over time it came to mean 'to draw, paint' and also 'a stroke' in characters.