Character stories

The simplest character in the language: one line for one. It is also the first stroke a child is taught — 横, drawn left to right, and the foundation of almost every character that follows.

A vertical stroke crossed by a horizontal. The oldest forms are just the vertical line with a thickening in the middle; the crossbar is what that swelling turned into.

Two legs mid-stride, seen from the side. It is one of the oldest shapes in the script and it still looks like what it draws.

A person, 人, standing with both arms stretched out. "Big" is drawn as the biggest a human body can make itself.

An open mouth. As a component it marks characters about eating, speaking and calling out — 吃 eat, 喝 drink, 叫 shout.

Three peaks with the tallest in the middle. Four thousand years later it is still three peaks.

The traditional 馬 keeps the mane on top and four legs underneath. The simplified 马 kept the gesture and threw away the legs.

The traditional 門 is two hinged leaves of a gate, drawn facing each other. The simplified 门 is one of them.

The sun with a mark in the middle. The circle squared off as brush writing replaced carving, but the dot in the centre survived.

A crescent, not a full moon — the moon is drawn at the shape you can tell apart from the sun. It doubles as the word for month, because a month is one cycle of it.

A stream with current lines either side. Squashed to three strokes on the left of a character — 氵 — it marks almost everything wet: 河 river, 海 sea, 泪 tear.

Flames rising with sparks at the sides. Flattened underneath a character it becomes 灬, four dots — which is why 热 hot and 煮 boil have feet made of fire.

A trunk with branches above and roots below. Two of them side by side make 林, a wood; three make 森, a forest.

A line driven through the centre of a frame. 中国 — the "middle country" — is what China has called itself for well over two thousand years.

A person with arms out, 大, and one flat line above the head: whatever is over you. It means sky, heaven, weather, and a day all at once.

A head seen from the front — the two horns are still at the top. In slang today 牛 on its own means "impressive".

Early forms wrote four as four stacked lines, 亖. It was too easy to miscount against 三, so the script borrowed an unrelated character that happened to sound the same — which is why four looks nothing like one, two and three.

A field divided by irrigation paths, seen from above. The practice grid you are writing in is named after it: 田字格, the field-character box.

A tree, 木, with a short mark drawn across its roots to point at them. "Root" became "origin", and 日本 — sun-origin — is how Japan got its Chinese name.

Originally the name of a river, then of the Han dynasty, then of the majority ethnic group — which is why the writing system is called 汉字, Han characters.

Not the treasure-hoarding dragon of European stories. This one commands rain and rivers; farmers prayed to it in a drought and emperors borrowed it as their emblem.

Read lè it means happy; read yuè the same character means music. The traditional form 樂 shows strings mounted over wood — an instrument.

A woman, 女, beside a child, 子. The traditional reading is a mother with her child: the picture of things being well.

A person, 亻, leaning against a tree, 木. The whole idea of rest is drawn in six strokes.

A woman, 女, under a roof, 宀. Shelter is the whole picture of safety.

The oldest forms show a person carrying grain on their back — one harvest, one year. The word for year and the word for the crop cycle were the same thing.

The silk radical, 纟, is on the left because red was a dye colour before it was anything else. Red is the colour of luck: the envelope money is given in, the paper on the door, what a bride traditionally wears.

An enclosure drawn around what is inside it. 团圆 — round and whole — is the word for the family gathering at new year and Mid-Autumn, and it is why the food eaten at both is round.

A field, 田, above strength, 力. The character records who was expected to work the land when it was coined — it is a snapshot of an argument, not a fact about people.

Two people, 人人, sitting on the ground, 土. The character is a picture of the situation it names.

The radical 贝 is a cowrie shell — money before coins existed. It is still sitting inside most characters about value: 财 wealth, 贵 expensive, 买 buy, 贫 poor.

The same word means cooked rice and a meal. 吃饭 — "eat rice" — is how you say eat, whatever is actually on the table.

A child, 子, under a roof, with hands above. Learning drawn as a child being shown something indoors.

The sun, 日, next to the moon, 月. Two sources of light put side by side to mean bright — and by extension clear, obvious, understood.

A wall, 囗, drawn around jade, 玉 — the treasure inside the boundary. The traditional 國 puts a weapon, 或, inside the wall instead.

Drops falling from a line of cloud. As a lid on other characters it marks everything the sky drops: 雪 snow, 雷 thunder, 雾 fog.

Served whole at new year's eve dinner and deliberately not finished: 鱼 yú sounds like 余 yú, "surplus". Fish left on the plate means a year with plenty left over.

In Chinese stories the rabbit lives on the moon, pounding medicine with a pestle. At Mid-Autumn children are told to look for its shape in the full moon.

One word covering the colour of the sky, young grass and jade. Chinese did not split blue from green at this point in its history, and 青 is the word that kept both.

A person, 亻, beside speech, 言. Trust is someone standing by their word — and the same character came to mean a letter.

A hand, 手, held above an eye, 目 — shading your eyes to see into the distance.

A sun, 日, sitting under sprouting growth. Spring is drawn as the moment the light gets under the plants.

Folded and eaten at midnight on new year's eve in the north, partly because the shape echoes the old ingot-shaped currency 元宝 — you are eating money.

Grain, 禾, beside fire, 火 — the burning of stubble after the harvest is in. Autumn named after the smell of the fields in September.

Grass on top, 艹. A tree underneath, 木. A person, 人, standing in between. The character is someone out among the plants, picking leaves.

Grain, 禾, over a sun or a mouth depending on the era — the smell of cooked millet. It names good smells generally, and it is the 香 in 香港, Hong Kong, "fragrant harbour".

The traditional 愛 has a heart, 心, sitting in its middle. The simplified 爱 replaced it with 友, friend. Whether that was a loss is still argued over at dinner tables.

A roof, 宀, drawn over a pig, 豕. In an early farming society a household was exactly that: a shelter with the animals kept inside it.

Chinese has no single word for "brother". 哥 is specifically an older one; a younger one is 弟. Age is built into the vocabulary, not added as an adjective.

Three trees. Chinese builds meaning by stacking: one 木 is a tree, two 林 is a wood, three 森 is a forest you can get lost in.

A drum above a mouth: noise and celebration. Doubled into 囍, double happiness, it goes on the wall at weddings — a character that exists only for that one purpose.

On new year's eve this goes on the front door — usually upside-down on purpose. "Upside-down" is 倒 dào, which sounds exactly like 到 dào, "has arrived". The door reads as a joke everyone understands: fortune has arrived.