This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
戶
In brief: the home of the primordial spirit, a doorway back
Common reading
A household, a family: one family is called one 户. Pictographic. The oracle-bone form depicts half of 门 (門). Original sense: a single-leaf door. Shuowen: “户 means to protect. Half a 門 is called 戶.” Zishu: “One leaf is called 户, two leaves 门. Also, at the east of a hall or chamber it is 户; at a residence or precinct it is 门.”
Design reading
The original sense of 尸 is the visible human body. A dot added on top shows the function and inner meaning of this body: the human body is the home of a person’s primordial spirit, the place where the primordial spirit dwells. With this body a person can cultivate and return to where they came from, so it can also be seen as a doorway or entrance. This body is also a kind of protection (护, hù) for the person, and so it has the sound of 护.
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.