Sinograph Addenda · Signs

女woman · nǚ · woman

woman

Where it comes from

A figure kneeling with hands folded before her — the oracle-bone posture, kept recognizable through three thousand years of rewriting; the reading is classic. She anchors a whole family: beside a child she is 好fond · hǎo · good, fine; (hào) to be fond of, to love, beside a mouth she lends her old sound to 如like · rú · to be like, as; if; to go to. Taught in the verbless-sentence chapter.

How to remember it

The kneeling figure, hands crossed: woman — the script’s most steadfast pictographan early sign that is still simply a picture of the thing it means.

In the wild