Nǚ 女
The character for ‘woman’ and ‘girl’, and radical 38 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters to do with women are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 女 as ‘woman, girl; feminine’, and also as the tenth lunar mansion. 好 ‘good, excellent, fine; well’ and 媽 ‘mother, mama’ (simplified 妈) are filed under it. Mandarin reads it nǚ; Japanese, onna.
Origin and history
The two accounts of the earliest form disagree on the pose. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on Chinese writing says the first graph for woman “depicted a kneeling figure”, where the graph for man, 人, “resembled a standing figure”. Wieger, in 1927, saw “the ritual bearing of the Chinese women, the arms hanging down, and crossed over the body”, and noted that “The head was not represented.”
好: a woman and a child
好 sets 女 beside 子, the child. Wieger explained it as “What is good, what one loves”, a wife and children, and so “By extension, good, to love”. He called 女 the radical “of characters relating to women”.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsZǐ 子The character for ‘child’ and ‘offspring’, and radical 39 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for children are filed.
- The same shape in Tarot cardsAce of CupsThe ace of cups in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a hand from a cloud holding a cup from which four streams pour, and a dove descending with a Host. A. E. Waite read it as joy, content, nourishment and abundance.
See also
Rén 人, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手, Mù 目, Shuǐ 水.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+5973, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+597D, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+5ABD, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 18 (Han), The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 18: East Asia, Unicode Consortium, 18.1.8 Radical-Stroke Indices; 18.1.14 Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement
- Chinese Characters (Léon Wieger, 1927), Léon Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification, translated by L. Davrout, second edition (1927), Catholic Mission Press, Hsien-hsien (Internet Archive full text), Lesson 67 A
- Chinese writing (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 19 November 2025), History
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or letters and numbers.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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