Zǐ 子
The character for ‘child’ and ‘offspring’, and radical 39 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for children are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 子 as ‘offspring, child; fruit, seed of; first earthly branch’. 孩 ‘baby, child; children’ and 字 ‘letter, character, word’ are filed under it. Mandarin reads it zǐ; Japanese, ko.
Origin and history
Wieger read the character as “A new-born child, swathed up”, which, he reports from the old gloss, is why “the legs are not visible”. “In an ancient form, the child has hair.” He called it the radical “of characters mostly relating to children”.
字, a child under a roof
字, the word for a written character, is 子 under a roof. Wieger glossed it “To bear and nurse; to have” children in one’s house, and then, “By extension, the compound characters”, those “begotten by the process of composition” from simpler ones. 子 also stands beside 女 in 好, ‘good’.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsKǒu 口The character for ‘mouth’ and ‘opening’, and radical 30 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for eating, calling out and other uses of the mouth are filed.
- 子 is the first earthly branch, the branch of the RatYear of the RatThe Rat is the first of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch zi. The most recent Year of the Rat ran from 25 January 2020 to 11 February 2021; the next begins on 11 February 2032.
See also
Nǚ 女, Rén 人, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手, Mù 目, Shuǐ 水.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+5B50, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+5B69, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+5B57, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- 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 94 A
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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