韪 (wěi): right; correct; proper

Meanings

1 right; correct; proper
2 good; commendable

Characters

韪

wěi

right; correct (literary)

Examples

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.

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 → 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'.