韪 (wěi) · right; correct; proper

Meanings

1 right; correct; proper
2 good; commendable

Characters

韪

wěi

right; correct (literary)

Examples

HSK 6

他敢冒天下之大不韪去做这件事。

Tā gǎn mào tiānxiàzhīdàbùwěi qù zuò zhè jiàn shì.

He dared to do what was great and forbidden by the entire world.

HSK 7-9

君子韪其言。

Jūnzǐ wěi qí yán.

The gentleman approved of his words.

Tips

register

wěi is archaic. In modern Chinese it survives almost exclusively inside one fixed phrase: 冒天下之大不韪 (literally 'to brave the great not-right of all under heaven') - to dare do what the whole world condemns. The phrase comes from the Zuo Zhuan: 犯五不韪 'commits the five wrongs'. Outside this idiom and historical texts, 韪 is essentially never used.

history

The locus classicus is the Zuo Zhuan, Duke Yin year 11 (722 BCE), where the small state of Xi attacks Zheng and a minister lists 五不韪 - five wrongs Xi commits in the act. Xi is duly defeated, and the phrase entered the canon as a name for catastrophic moral overreach.

Components

radical

韦 wéi

tanned leather; supplying the sound

Right 韦 - the indexing radical (Kangxi #178), originally a pictograph of feet walking around an enclosure, later borrowed for 'tanned leather'. Here it supplies the sound (wéi to wěi, tone shift only). The same phonetic family includes 伟 (great), 纬 (latitude), 围 (surround), 违 (violate).

semantic

是 shì

right; correct; to be

Left 是 - supplies the meaning 'right / correct / what is so'. The semantic core sits entirely here: 韪 is essentially a literary synonym for 是 in its older sense 'right, that which is so'.