Hieroglyphs Addenda · Signs

𓏲

coil

NameZ7
Readsw
Meanscoil (cursive quail chick)
Taught in04 · Your first signs

Where it comes from

The cursive shorthand of the quail chick G43: a small spiral, all that survives of the bird when the hand is hurrying. Same sound w, two shapes — the scribes swapped freely between the drawn bird and the quick coil.

How to remember it

The coil is a chick drawn by a scribe with no time: body, beak, and feet collapsed into one curl. When you meet the spiral, hear the same w — the bird is in there, compressed.

In the wild

From a Middle Egyptian literary text (aes corpus). urn:nabu:aes:sawlit:GJA5VMSJDFAOPG6TP6ZYY3KCRI:IBUBdz4GvuvTV0SLspFbeDzffeo · license: attribution.

Piece by piece:

  • mw≡n — our water, the plural strokes carrying “our”
  • pw — it is: the coil riding behind p in the little is-word

The nominal sentence you met in the water chapter — with the coil, not the chick, closing it. The twins are told apart in 101’s chapter 04.

Easily confused

SignNameKey
𓅱 G43 chick