Sinograph Addenda · Signs

long

Name	long
Reads	cháng
Means	long; to grow, elder
Taught in	13 · Like and alike

Where it comes from

An elder with long, unbound hair leaning on a staff — the hair is the length. Read cháng, it is “long”; read zhǎng, it is “to grow, the elder, the chief” — one picture holding both ends of a life. Taught in the like-and-alike chapter.

How to remember it

Hair streaming out stroke by stroke past its pin — a lifetime’s growth: long. Read the same picture as the elder it grew on and you have zhǎng, “senior.”

In the wild

長短相較。cháng duǎn xiāng jiào"long and short measure each other" — no length without a shortness beside it; another of the Laozi's pairs that create each other.

Laozi 2. urn:nabu:kanripo:KR5c0057:002:1a · license: attribution.