This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
夫
In brief: taking the laws of heaven and earth as the foundation of one's life
Common reading
Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts a standing person (大), and the 一 on top shows a hairpin in the hair: an adult man, a 丈夫. In ancient times a man counted as a 丈夫 only when he came of age, tied up his hair and was capped, so 一 was added as a mark. Original sense: a general term for an adult man. Shuowen: “夫 means a grown man.” Duan’s note: “夫 is from 一 and 大, compound-ideative and pictographic. Under the Zhou system eight cun made a chi and ten chi a zhang; a man was eight chi tall, hence 丈夫.” Note to the Book of Songs: “A 夫 has the virtue of supporting and assisting and can be relied upon; he is called 丈夫.”
Design reading
A person rising up through two horizontals shows a person who takes the laws of heaven and earth as the foundation of his life and the standard for his conduct: that is 夫, a 丈夫, a true man.
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.