Amazing Chinese Characters (147) Blood -血

The shell bone script for character Blood is

which the middle inside is a drop of blood, the rest is Pot, the Cooking Pot we learnt in Post 144.

Ancient Chinese used A Drop hanging on the Pot to express "Blood". In ancient time, when people killed the animals for meat, they used a bit pot bellow to collect the blood. The character shows the picture, a blood is dropping into the pot.

It is an indicative character.

Let's see its small seal script

the drop becomes a short line because small seal script uses short line to express the dot, here is a drop.

The clerical script is

The top pot disappears, the blood drop becomes a short stroke down to the left.

The current standard printing script is

血

almost same as its clerical script.

Its Pinyin is Xue3.