韦 (wéi): soft leather

Meanings

1 soft leather
2 surname Wei

Characters

韦

wéi

soft leather; surname Wei

Examples

韦编三绝是形容读书勤奋的成语。

Wéi biān sān jué shì xíngróng dúshū qínfèn de chéngyǔ.

'Weibian sanjue' is an idiom describing studious reading.

Tips

history

In ancient China, 韦 referred to tanned soft leather used for binding bamboo slips into books. The idiom 韦编三绝 describes Confucius reading the Book of Changes so often that the leather bindings broke three times.

Components

pictograph

韦 wéi

tanned hide; encircle

Atomic pictograph in its simplified form: originally drawn as two feet circling an enclosure, picturing the act of going around something — which then specialised to the tanned hide that was wrapped, soaked, and worked in a circular motion. Kangxi radical 178 in its 4-stroke simplified shape, replacing the traditional 韋.

Radical

Soft Leather Kangxi #178

A thin radical for tanned, supple leather (as opposed to 革 raw hide). Few productive compounds in modern Chinese — 韩, 韧, 韫 are the most visible. The original graph showed two feet circling an enclosure, which classical scholars later adopted to write 'tanned leather' once the original 'circle' meaning shifted to 違 / 围.