Amazing Chinese Characters (187) Smell and Smelly - 臭，嗅

The shell bone script for character Smell and Smelly is

the top part

is nose

the bottom

is dog.

So the character Smell and Smelly is "a big nose of a dog", or "dog's big nose", which means "Smell" at the beginning.

The big seal script for the character is

It is similar to its shell bone script.

As time past, people needed more characters to express more meanings. For example, there was no character for Smelly. How to solve the problem? Ancient people borrowed the character Smell for smelly. So a long period of time, the character had two meanings: Smell, and Smelly.

However, it caused confusion. In order to avoid the confusion, ancient Chinese added a mouth to the character to become

to be the character Smell, and let 

to be character Smelly.

The small seal script for character Smelly is

There is no small seal script for character Smell in dictionary.

The clerical script for character Smelly is

The clerical script for character Smell is

The current standard printing script for the two characters

臭

嗅

The Pinyin for 臭 is Chou4.

The Pinyin for 嗅 is Xiu4.