Amazing Chinese Characters (183) Black - 黑

There are two characters for Black, we discuss one of them in this post, will discuss another one in next post.

The bronze script for character Black is

The big seal script for the Character is

Both top parts are a face with some black dots, indicating the face has black dots. There are some black dots around the bottom too.

The bottom ones are Hot (Double Fires, see Post 185)

The full character means those who are close to the big fire like Kiln worker face is black because too many charcoal dots or dust on the face.

The small seal script for the character is

the top is the face with three bars to replace the dots in the big seal script, the bottom is two Fires, similar to the big seal script.

The clerical script for the character is

the top part is more similar to big seal script, the bottom part is not similar to anyone. The only thing I can tell is that the 4 dots on the bottom is for Fire, because Fire has four strokes,

Big seal script, or

Small seal script.

When a character has big top part like Black, not much space for the Fire on the bottom, people had to compress the strokes to dots. Most of 4 dots on the bottom mean Fire.

The current standard printing script is

黑

very similar to the clerical script.

Its pinyin is Hei1.