卦 (guà) · divinatory trigram or hexagram

Measure Word

一个卦 gè

Meanings

1 divinatory trigram or hexagram
2 one of the 8 trigrams (or 64 hexagrams) of the I Ching
3 fortune-telling reading

Characters

卦

guà

divinatory diagram

Examples

HSK 5

他去找算命先生算了一卦。

Tā qù zhǎo suànmìng xiānsheng suàn le yí guà.

He went to a fortune-teller and had a reading done.

HSK 7-9

《易经》有八卦和六十四卦。

《 Yìjīng 》 yǒu bāguà hé liùshísì guà.

The I Ching has eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams.

Tips

history

卦 are the divinatory diagrams of 《易经》 (the I Ching / Book of Changes), built from solid (阳爻) and broken (阴爻) lines. The 8 trigrams (八卦, three lines each) represent fundamental natural phenomena: heaven 乾, earth 坤, thunder 震, water 坎, mountain 艮, wind 巽, fire 离, lake 兑, and combine into 64 hexagrams. 算卦 means 'to cast a divination'.

Components

radical

卜 bǔ

divine; oracle bone

卜 is the indexing divination radical, a crack in a heated tortoise-shell, the oracular signal read by ancient diviners. It carries the meaning: 卦 names a hexagram, the eight (八卦) or sixty-four diagrams of the Yijing. Sister chars 占 (divine), 贞 (originally divine an oracle) share the radical.

phonetic

圭 guī

jade tablet; ceremonial sceptre

圭 (guī) supplies the sound, initial preserved, rime drifted from -ui to -uà with tone shift. Same phonetic also drives 挂 (hang), 蛙 (frog), 娃 (baby). The two 土 stacked also evoke ritual-stick markers laid on the ground for divination, faintly fitting 卦's role as a hexagram diagram.