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Etymology data from Wiktionary via Wiktextract (CC BY-SA 4.0). Chinese character data from the 說文解字, the Taiwan MOE 國語辭典簡編本 (CC BY-ND 3.0 TW) and HSK/TOCFL lists.

Explanations are written by a local model (gemma4) and only published after a verification pass against the cited sources. How it works.

Chinese

妻

/t͡ɕʰi⁵⁵/
wife
  • Ideogrammatic compound 會意
  • HSK 4
  • TOCFL 6
  • radical 女
  • 8 strokes

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Origin

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 肀 (“hand grabbing hair”) + 女 (“woman”) ― a man grabbing a woman's hair to show ownership (marriage by capture).

Thought to be cognate to 齊 (OC *dzêi, “same, equal (adj.), in line”) (SWJZhttps://ctext.org/shuo-wen-jie-zi/nv-bu#n34692; Karlgren, 1956) & interpreted as "an equal to her husband"; yet this is unlikely considering the realities of ancient societies (Schuessler, 2007).

Schuessler instead proposes Austroasiatic etymology: he reconstructs 妻 (OC *tshə̂i) < *k-sə̂i and compares it to Middle Khmer [script needed] (kansai, “wife”) (whence Khmer កន្សៃ (kɑɑkɑnsay, “wife”)) and Khmer [script needed] (*khsay, “be female”) with *ka(n)- being a female marker (ibid.).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • ideaChinese肀 “hand grabbing hair”
  • ideaChinese女 “woman; (only of humans in Standard Chinese) female”

Related: Khmer កន្សៃ

Words built on it: 妻子, 夫妻

Meanings

character
  1. wife

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

妻：婦與夫齊者也。从女从屮从又。又，持事，妻職也。

Xu Shen, c. 100 CE — the first analytical dictionary of Chinese characters.

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 將女兒嫁給他人。 例：可妻、以女妻之

© Ministry of Education, Taiwan — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW, shown unaltered.

How 妻 was written 字形演變

  1. 妻 in Oracle bone script
    Oracle bone
    甲骨文
    Shang, c. 1250–1050 BCE
  2. 妻 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  3. 妻 in Chu slips & silk script
    Chu slips & silk
    楚系簡帛
    Warring States
  4. 妻 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  5. 妻 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  6. 妻 in Regular script
    Regular
    楷書
    since c. 200 CE

Historical forms collected by the legacy etymfun dataset; most characters have several attested variants.

Sources

  • Historical glyph forms (zdic.net 字形演变) — Rights unverified
  • HSK / TOCFL word lists — Facts (levels)
  • 教育部《國語辭典簡編本》 (Taiwan MOE) — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW
  • 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi (Xu Shen, c. 100 CE) — Public domain
  • Written form — n/a
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 妻