Zhongwensday 2026-W02

羊 (yáng)

羊 (yáng) is an interesting character because it looks like what it means: sheep. It doesn't look a lot like a sheep, but you can imagine the horns at the top of the character are horns. Rather than pretend more knowledge than I have, I'll pass you off to Wikipedia to see an evolution of the character from the time where it did look more like a sheep: Radical 123: 羊部

I was thinking about this character today because the word of the day today was 洋葱 (yángcōng), onion. (@zhwotd variously on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon) Some words I learned from reading, some from listening; this one, and 怎么样 (zěnmeyàng), roughly "how about it?", I learned from listening. I didn't think much of the yang, or that it sounded like the 羊 (yáng) for sheep, which we'll talk about when having hot pot. I just noticed yesterday that 洋 (洋葱) and 样 (怎么样) are different characters: one 羊 preceded by 水 (水--> 氵, shuǐ, water), the other by 木 (mù, tree).

(General warning not to put too much stock into breaking down characters into their smallest constituent elements and trying to extract meaning from them. Sometimes yes, usually no.)

OK, so how many yangs are there? So, limiting it to just the sheep yangs (forget other characters that sounds like yang, e.g., 阳 yáng), and the ones that sound like yang (forget characters that incorporate 羊 but don't sound like yang, e.g., 美 měi where the top half is 羊), here's what I found searching on the MDBG Chinese dictionary. Another general warning, many characters don't fully function as words on their own in typical usage, but are paired with other characters. I mess this up often enough. Defintions included below anyway, just don't take them too literally. If you search around in the dictionary with wildcards like "*洋*" you'll find words that contain the character 洋.

Don't fool yourself that any of this helps you learn the language. Breaking down the characters is just for fun.