yì
justice
Phonosemantic compound. 羊 represents the meaning and 我 represents the sound. In ancient China sheep (羊) were associated with goodness and beauty, which is why 羊 is a component in characters like 美 (beautiful), 善 (benevolent), and 義 (justice).
Evolution

Oracle script
(~1250-1000 BC)
Bronze script
Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)
Seal script
Shuowen (~100 AD)
Clerical script
Western Jin dynasty (266-316 AD)Regular script
ModernDefinitions
Historical pronunciation
Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Pinyin | Gloss |
*ŋ(r)aj-s | ngjeH | yì | duty; justice |
Statistics
Not found in HSK word list
Appears in 61.8933% of movies
659th most common character in movies
208th most common character in books
Miscellaneous
Strokes | 13 |
Simplified | |
Unicode | U+7FA9 |
Shuowen | “義,己之威儀也。从我羊。羛,《墨翟書》義从弗。魏郡有羛陽鄉,讀若錡。今屬鄴,本內黃北二十里。” |
Sources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

