蛇 (yí): winding; meandering

Meanings

1 winding; meandering
2 yielding; compliant (classical, in 委蛇)

Characters

蛇

yí

winding; meandering

Examples

他对上司只是虚与委蛇。

Tā duì shàngsī zhǐshì xūyǔwēiyí.

He just goes through the motions of cooperating with his boss.

山路委蛇而上。

Shānlù wēiyí ér shàng.

The mountain path winds upward.

Tips

register

This reading is classical and shows up almost exclusively in the bound compound 委蛇 (wēiyí), a variant of 逶迤 wēiyí 'long and winding'. By far the most common context today is the idiom 虚与委蛇 (xūyǔwēiyí), meaning to feign civility or go through the motions without real engagement.

mistakes

Don't read 委蛇 as wěishé. The character keeps its everyday shé sound in every other compound (毒蛇, 蛇皮, 画蛇添足), but in this one classical phrase it becomes yí.

Components

radical

虫 chóng

insect; creeping creature

Insect radical on the left — the indexing radical (Kangxi #142). For this reading the radical is just a graphic carryover from the snake sense; the yí reading no longer means snake but the radical sticks around because the graph is shared with shé.

phonetic

它 tā

it; (originally) snake-pictograph

Right side 它 was originally a snake pictograph. The yí reading is an old phonetic borrowing from the same graph — Old Chinese had related rimes for these sounds. Today the connection is opaque; treat the yí reading as a fixed classical pronunciation rather than something the components predict.