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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

雙

shuāng
two; double; twin
  • Ideogrammatic compound 會意
  • HSK 3
  • TOCFL 3
  • radical 隹
  • 18 strokes

Etymology graph

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  • derived
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Origin

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意): 雔 (“two birds”) + 又 (“hand”) – Represents two birds (隹) in someone's right hand (又).

Several etymologies have been posited:

* From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *dzum ~ tsum (“pair”), whence Jingpho zum (“to be in pairs”), Burmese စုံ (cum, “pair”), but this comparison may be problematic given the mismatch in the final nasal (STEDT, Hill, 2019).

* Related to Tibetan ཟུང (zung, “pair; couple”), Mru [script needed] (choŋ, “pair”) (Coblin, 1986; Löffler, 1966; Schuessler, 2007), but this would require assuming the Proto-Sino-Tibetan word to be *C-zuŋ (Schuessler, 2007). Jacques (2015b) rules out the possibility of comparing with the Tibetan word because Tibetan z- usually comes from *dz-.

* Doublet of 孿 (OC *smroːns, *smrons, “twin”) (Baxter, 1992), but this has been related to Jingpho marun (“to have twins”) (from run (“to be in pairs”)), which would point to yet another Proto-Sino-Tibetan root *run (Schuessler, 2007).

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • inheritedProto-Sino-Tibetan*dzum ~ tsum “pair”
  • ideaChinese雔 “pair of birds”
  • ideaChinese又 “again; once more”

Related: Jingpho zum, Burmese စုံ, Tibetan ཟུང, Jingpho marun

Meanings

character
  1. two; double; twin
  2. even (divisible by two)
  3. double; two-fold; twice
  4. twins
  5. Classifier for a pair of objects. ⇒ all nouns using this classifier
  6. a rare surname, Shuang

Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字

雙：隹二枚也。从雔，又持之。

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

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 兩個、兩隻。 例：雙手、雙眼、雙峰駱駝
  2. 偶數的。與單相對。 例：雙數、雙號
  3. 加倍的。 例：雙薪、雙份、雙料
  4. 量詞。計算成對物品的單位。 例：一雙鞋子、兩雙筷子

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

How 雙 was written 字形演變

  1. 雙 in Chu slips & silk script
    Chu slips & silk
    楚系簡帛
    Warring States
  2. 雙 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  3. 雙 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
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 雙