Browse Literary Chinese

Word studies

Curated studies of the language's central words, with attestation counts and cited lines from the corpus record.

• 道 dao — way, road, path; the course things follow; a method or teaching; to speak or guide
• 德 de — potency, moral force, inner power; the virtue or efficacy a thing possesses by conforming to the way proper to it
• 命 ming — mandate, decree, command; the allotment or destiny conferred from above; the span and lot of a life
• 氣 qi — breath, vapor, air; the vital energy that circulates through body and cosmos; temper, spirit, disposition
• 仁 ren — humaneness, benevolence, co-humanity
• 神 shen — spirit, numen, the divine or daimonic power; by extension the animating spirit of a person, and the quality of being spirit-like, unfathomable, beyond calculation
• 天 tian — sky, heaven; the natural order and its authority; the source and warrant of what is right
• 無 wu — not, without, non-being; the absence or negation that early Chinese thought treats as a generative ground rather than mere lack
• 心 xin — heart-mind: the organ of thought, feeling, desire, and moral discernment held together as one seat
• 性 xing — inborn nature; the native disposition a thing has from birth; what a creature or a person is by constitution rather than by cultivation