méi
noun #7,014

Meanings

  1. 1 eyebrow
  2. 2 brow

Examples

Tā de méi hěn nóng.
Her eyebrows are thick.
Tā zhòu le zhòuméi.
He furrowed his brow.

Tips

usage
appears in many expressions: 眉毛 (eyebrow hair), 眉头 (space between brows), 眉目 (features/clues), 燃眉之急 (urgent crisis, lit. 'fire burning the eyebrows').

Components

radical
eye (radical)
Bottom eye radical (Kangxi #109) — pictograph of an eye stood on its short side, here lengthened by one extra horizontal where the eyebrow joins. Indexes directly: the eyebrow is anatomically tied to the eye. Family , , , , . The whole reads as eyebrow-over-eye once you stop seeing on top.
semantic
shī
eyebrow shape (graphic top)
Top three strokes — graphically the 'corpse' shape, but in it's purely a graphic stand-in for the curving eyebrow above the eye. The original oracle-bone form drew curved hair-strokes directly above ; over time those wavy strokes regularised into this -like silhouette. Don't read it as 'corpse' here.

Stroke Order

méi