Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Amazing Chinese Characters (256) Hair - 毛

The bronze script for character Hair is


which is grass, lush grass.


The big seal script of the character is

similar to its bronze script.

Let's recall the character Hand - 手 (Post 55), its big seal script is

which is mirror symmetric to character Hair, a little bit confusing.

The small seal script of the character Hair is

compare it to the character Hand

mirror symmetric.

As we have seen, originally character Hair means grass, but it became to mean "hair" - animal and human hair long time ago.




The clerical script of character Hair

in comparison with Hand

the difference is a little bit bigger.

Its song typeface is

which is big different from song typeface Hand,


As time past, the original meaning of Hair has expanded from grass to hair, nowadays, it means human or animal hair in most of time but grass in some cases especially in proverbs, e.g. proverb 不毛之地 - soil with no grass at all (barren land).

Its pinyin is Mao2.

No comments:

Post a Comment