This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
斤
In brief: correcting with the axe: cutting away what is crooked
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form has a horizontal blade above and a curved handle below, depicting an axe. Original sense: an axe-like tool. Shuowen: “斤 is an axe for cutting wood.” Duan’s note: “Anything for chopping things is called 斧; the axe for chopping wood is called 斤.” Also written 觔; sixteen liang make one jin (Hanshu, “Treatise on Pitch-pipes and the Calendar”).
Design reading
The left-falling stroke on top shows something not upright, and the vertical left-falling stroke joined on the left shows chopping at what is not upright. Chopping according to what? The horizontal on the right shows rules and requirements, and the vertical joined below shows conforming to the rules and requirements. Together: chopping away what is not upright so that it conforms to certain rules or requirements; this is the function of an axe, and it is used for the axe. The word 斧正 (fǔzhèng, “to correct with the axe”, to kindly correct someone’s writing) should come from this meaning.
Also, “short of a jin and lacking a liang” is a common phrase today for dishonest merchants. When merchants weigh rice and flour, they may add a little and take away a little until the scale is level; but dishonest merchants may use all sorts of tricks to give short weight. So 斤, the character for correcting with the axe, was used as a unit of weight, to remind people to cut away such crooked intentions.
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.