This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
兆
In brief: the cracks in a divination shell
Common reading
The manuscript gives no common reading for this character, so none is given here.
Design reading
Shuowen: “兆 is divination: the cracks of a scorched tortoise shell.” Rites of Zhou, “Grand Diviner”: “He is in charge of the methods of the three kinds of cracks.” Huainanzi, “Benjing”: “They do not divine by trigrams and cracks.” As a number it means a million, expressing a great multitude. The cracks of a divination shell are more numerous than a person’s thoughts, showing that the possibilities of the world exceed what people can imagine, so it is used for ten times 亿, a million.
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.