noun

Meanings

  1. 1 ceremonial vessel for ritual offerings
  2. 2 variant of 禮 / 礼; ritual; ceremony

Examples

Zài jiǎgǔwén zhōng, lǐ zì miáohuì le chéngfàng yù hé gǔwù jìpǐn de lǐqì.
On oracle bones, this character depicts a ceremonial vessel holding jade and grain offerings.
Lǐ shì lǐ de gǔzì, hòulái cái jiā shàng shì páng yǐ qiángdiào jìsì zhī yì.
豊 is the ancient form of 禮; the radical 礻 was added later to make the ritual sense explicit.

Tips

register
is archaic — it does not appear in modern Mandarin outside of paleography, etymology discussions, and the occasional personal name. The modern character for 'ritual / ceremony / propriety' is (simplified) / (traditional). Use those in any real-world context. appears only when a writer wants to evoke the original pictographic form, e.g. in scholarly works on oracle-bone script.
history
On oracle bones, shows a (high-stemmed ritual vessel) with offerings — usually two strings of jade — piled on top. From this concrete picture of a sacrificial display the meaning extended to the whole sphere of ritual conduct. When ritual became an abstract category, scribes added (altar) to disambiguate the abstract sense, yielding . also has a rare fēng reading as a graphic variant of / (abundant), but this usage is essentially limited to historical philology.

Components

pictograph
ritual vessel piled with offerings
Pictograph of a ritual stem-vessel (the bottom seven strokes) supporting ceremonial offerings (the top six strokes, originally two strings of jade flanking an altar marker). The whole graph shows a sacrificial display at the moment of offering. This is the original character; was added later to give (ritual). Indexed under Kangxi #151 .

Filed under radical (dòu, #151) by convention. is not a separate component in , so no strokes are highlighted.

Stroke Order