馬

Pictogram (象形) – a horse with its head facing the left, showing a flowing mane in the wind, standing vertically on two legs. In the bronze inscriptions, the head was often simplified into an eye (目 (mù)). The legs eventually evolved into four dots (灬 (huǒ), unrelated to 火 (huǒ)).

Contrast with 鹿 (lù, “deer”), which saw a very different development, and 𢊁 (as in 薦 /荐 (jiàn)), which is a hybrid: it has the legs of 馬 (灬 (huǒ)) but the head of 鹿 (lù).

Wanderwort (Jacques, 2009; Felner and Hill, 2019; Lai et al., 2020). This word is often compared to other Sino-Tibetan forms, e.g., Tibetan རྨང (rmang), Burmese မြင်း (mrang:), Japhug mbro, Tangut 𘆝 (*rjijr¹), Chepang [script needed] (sĕraŋ), Proto-Kuki-Chin *raŋ (> Lai ràŋ) (Benedict, 1972; Schuessler, 2007; STEDT), but the lack of nasal coda in Chinese would be irregular, suggesting borrowing from a sister language rather than common ancestry (Sagart et al., 2019). Outside of Sino-Tibetan, this has also been compared to Mongolian ᠮᠣᠷᠢ (mori), Korean 말 (mal), Japanese 馬(うま) (uma) (Schuessler, 2007; Lai et al., 2020).

The sense of “big” is derived from “horse”; compare the English uses of horse. For the insect prefix sense, see 螞 /蚂. It has converged with the sense of “big”.

The surname is popularly known to be prevalent among Hui Muslims, where it is likely derived from Arabic مُحَمَّد (muḥammad, “Muhammad”), although the surname 馬 itself predates him.

From Hokkien 媽 /妈 (má).

From 滿／满 (móa).