This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
女
In brief: yin and yang joined, bearing children
Common reading
Shuowen: “女 means a woman.” Wang Yu says: “In contrast, the unmarried is called 女 and the married 妇.” Shuowen: “爻 means to cross; it depicts the six lines of the Changes crossing at the top.” Note: 乂 is the ancient form of 五; two and five are the numbers of heaven and earth. A compound-ideative character; all characters from 爻 carry the sense of intermingling. Book of Changes, “Xici II”: “The Dao has movement and change, so we speak of the lines (爻).”
Design reading
When the upper right-falling stroke of 爻 becomes a horizontal and the upper left-falling stroke joins the lower right-falling stroke, it becomes 女. For humans, women bear the duty of giving birth; two hearts delighting in each other, yin and yang joined, bearing children: that is 女.
Related characters
About this entry
This entry is taken from the edited manuscript of LI Xutong’s Exploring the Design Mysteries of Chinese Characters. The common reading follows traditional philology, the Shuowen Jiezi and other classics, and modern dictionaries; the design reading recovers the rationale of the character’s formation from the meanings of its strokes, the pairing of yin and yang, and the nine-palace layout, following the New Six Scripts. The premise of the design reading, that the generative mechanism of Chinese characters was designed, is an axiom of this system and differs from the evolutionary account usual in philology; the two readings are kept apart, as surface and depth.