This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
未
In brief: still far from heaven, not yet risen
Common reading
Xiao Erya, “Guanggu”: “未 means not.” Shuowen: “未 means flavour: the flavours of the sixth month. Of the Five Phases, wood grows old in 未; it depicts a tree with layered branches and leaves.” The eighth of the earthly branches; as a double hour, about one to three in the afternoon.
Design reading
未 and 末, like 土 and 士, are two characters distinguished by the lengths of their two horizontals.
The vertical of 木 passes through the upper horizontal, and the upper horizontal is short, showing that one is still far from heaven and has not yet risen: the sense of “not yet (未) achieved”.
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.