Chinese

天下

tiānxià
the world; everything under the sky; all under heaven
  • HSK 6
  • TOCFL 5

Etymology graph

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Origin

Earliest attestations are in the Book of Documents, Classic of Poetry and bronze inscriptions such as that on the Western Zhou vessel Bin Gong Xu (豳公盨):

Pines (2002) thinks it "likely that "originally tianxia referred to the area under the direct rule of the Son of Heaven [a.k.a. the Zhou king], and its limits might have shrunk together with the contraction of royal power". See there for more on the term's gradual semantic evolution through the Spring and Autumn period, Warring States period, until after Qin's wars of unification.

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • characterChinese天 “sky; heavens; heavenly; celestial”
    • meaningChinese大 “of great size; big; large; huge”
    • soundChinese丁 “the fourth of the ten heavenly stems”
  • characterChinese下 “lower part of; under; beneath”

Sources