This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
犬
In brief: taking the animal side of “person”
Common reading
Pictographic. 犬 is one of the radicals; original sense: dog. In ancient times it meant a large dog in particular; later 犬 and 狗 became general names. Shuowen: “犬 is a dog with dewclaws; pictographic.” Confucius said: “Looking at the character 犬 is like a drawing of a dog.” Note: a dog with dewclaws is 犬, one that barks with its breath is 狗. Zhuangzi said: “A 狗 is not a 犬.”
Design reading
大 with a dot at the upper right is 犬. 大: a horizontal crossing 人, showing that a person who keeps to the way of humanity is a great person (大人); people of noble character are called great persons, which gives 大 its basic meaning. The left-falling stroke of 人 also carries the sense of outward appearance, so it shows that people eat the five grains and have a human body of flesh, living in a way similar to the animals of the world. The dot at the upper right shows the inner meaning of the yin side: taking the animal side expressed by 人. The dog has been with humans day and night and has been their companion from the very beginning, loyal and friendly to people, so it got the name 犬, related to 人 and 大.
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.