This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
好
In brief: 女 + 子: more hardship, faster cultivation, a good thing
Common reading
Compound-ideative: from 女 and from 子; original sense: beautiful, good-looking (Shuowen: “好 means beautiful”; Xu Kai: “子 is an honorific for a man; compound-ideative”).
Design reading
女 + 子. Life in this world is cultivation; with more hardship one cultivates faster, which is a good thing; women have more hardship in life, so 女 + 子 came to mean 好, good.
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.