要

Meaning: “pivot, cornerstone, keystone”

/kani no me/ → /kanome/ → /kaname/ A shift from older 蟹の目 (kani no me, “crab's eye”) from a superficial resemblance of the round pinhead of a folding fan to a crab's eye, influenced by a reanalysis of the term as 金目 (kaname, literally “metal” + visually prominent feature), as the pins were increasingly made from metal instead of earlier bamboo, wood, or whalebone. First cited to 1220.