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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

尺

chǐ
chi; Chinese foot (a traditional Chinese unit of distance based on the human forearm and equal to 10 cun (寸) or ¹/₁₀ zhang (丈))
  • Pictogram
  • HSK 4
  • TOCFL 4
  • radical 尸
  • 4 strokes

Etymology graph

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Origin

Uncertain. Various explanations include:

* A man (人) with a mark (乙) on his leg to indicate 10 cun (寸) above the foot. (Lin Yiguang, 1920)

* Differentiation of 乇 (OC *ʔr'aːɡ), 宅 (OC *r'aːɡ), or 斥 (OC *ŋ̊ʰjaːɡs, *ŋ̊ʰjaːɡ). (He Linyi, 1998, Ji Xusheng, 2014)

* Pictogram (象形) of a hand, more specifically the thumb and the middle finger, stretched out to measure the length of 10 cun (寸). (Shirakawa Shizuka, Lawrence J. Howell)

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

Words built on it: 尺寸

Meanings

character
  1. chi; Chinese foot (a traditional Chinese unit of distance based on the human forearm and equal to 10 cun (寸) or ¹/₁₀ zhang (丈))
  2. mainland chi; Chinese foot, standardized in 1984 as ¹/₃ meter
  3. Taiwanese foot, standardized as ¹⁰/₃₃ meter and identical to the Japanese shaku
  4. chek; Hong Kong foot, standardized as 0.371475 meters
  5. imperial foot
  6. ruler (straightedge) (Classifier: 把 m c; 支 m h mn; 桿／杆 m)

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

尺：十寸也。人手卻十分動脈爲寸口。十寸爲尺。尺，所以指尺䂓榘事也。从尸从乙。乙，所識也。周制，寸、尺、咫、尋、常、仞諸度量，皆以人之體爲法。凡尺之屬皆从尺。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 我國固有的音階符號之一。如上、尺、工、凡、合、四、乙等，統稱為「工尺」。以此編成的曲譜，稱為「工尺譜」。

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

How 尺 was written 字形演變

  1. 尺 in Bronze script
    Bronze
    金文
    Shang–Zhou
  2. 尺 in Qin slips script
    Qin slips
    秦系簡牘
    Qin
  3. 尺 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  4. 尺 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: 尺