Amazing Chinese Characters (280) Divine or Divination - 卜

The shell bone script of character of Divine or Divination is

a scepter of wizard, probably a tree branch, a special one.

The big seal script of the character is

The small seal script of the character is

The clerical script of the character is

The song typeface of the character is

卜

This character is one of the simplest characters with the fewest strokes. But the divination by a wizard with a scepter was disappeared long time ago, may be two thousands years. We don't know how the ancient Chinese did the divination, but Chinese still have done divined in different ways.

Therefore the character alone has not been used often, however it has been widely used as part of other characters, such as ideogram characters. So it is important to know it before we learn other characters with it.

The pinyin of the character is Bu1.