Login
Welcome! Introduction
Glyphs missing from your font set may appear strange, or not at all. We recommend enabling East Asian language support.
KA N ・ KE N
to bi ・ shi ra ki ji
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
「Rank badges were worn by men in the Chinese civil service and military. Each category had nine ranks. The civil service used birds to identify someone's position, while the military used real and mythological animals. The silver pheasant was the fourth highest rank that could be achieved. …Rank badges were worn on the chest and rear of robes and a wife was allowed to wear her husband's rank on special occasions. Her badge would be made as a mirror image of his.」
[ link now-dead was https://www.dresstheworld.co.uk/nottingham/media/41556 2013-08-22 so instead see https://exchange.umma.umich.edu/resources/26228 ]
Note that the「fourth-highest」rank of nine possible would be the fifth rank (五, 㠪) from the bottom.
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: variant of 鷴|鹇
Japanese EDRDG: silver pheasant, phasianus nycth
Unihan extended: the silver pheasant, Lophura nycthemera
Always keep in mind that these glyphs most likely were originally designed by groups of clever old men as vulgar riddles for their own entertainment
(see 籒 for that),
representing Chinese society many thousands of years ago, but intended NOT as a written or spoken language when created.
If these glyphs had been intended for language use, the sages could not have possibly designed a worse system!
Is it truly possible that all these glyphs started out as off-color jokes and puzzles?
Yes! It is, and often with multiple correct answers to each riddle, the same as is true today.
Sex had no shame in ancient China.
Why would it?
But, have there been necessary rewrites and altered explanations of the original elemental meanings over the centuries?
No one is suggesting these glyphs depict contemporary life in China, Japan, or anywhere else.
This site describes glyph meanings, not people.
These glyphs however, describe many and various things, including people, long before there were any notions of becoming politically incorrect.
The question to be answered is, should these glyphs continue being used, by anyone, anywhere, for expressing language?
(More...)
Despite how seemingly bad our human existence is today, do you actually believe that the so-called good old days were any better?
Or could they have been worse?
By the way, with a limited number of the same elements used by the sages again and again to form these glyphs,
you should expect to find the same explanations again and again, as tedious as that may become, and as an inherent trait of any lexicon.
This site explains multiple meanings of glyphs ignored or censored by other sources, generally as being too embarrassing to admit today.
Primal elements
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 41 entries
- Glyph.13153
- Strokes: 23
- other
Agree? Disagree? Express your opinion by posting a comment.
This publication has included material from the MDBG free online English to Chinese dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
This publication has included material from the JMdict (EDICT, etc.) dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Electronic Dictionaries Research Group.
This publication has included material from the Unicode Character Database. Copyright © 1991-2016 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed under these Terms of Use.