Let the healing begin

2005-02-08

Let the healing begin

At right, a "healing" product. You drive your hands into the green bunny head's temples and then relax. I'm not sure why this is better than just relaxing without your hands inside a pillow, but ours is not to question why.

To fill up space and make the formatting work, I now present the single most stroke-intensive kanji in my entire dictionary:

䯂

Not one, not two, but three horse (馬) radicals! Plus a tree (木), which makes a total of thirty-four strokes. This is what gives 䯂 the decisive advantage over its closest three-animal kanji rival, 麤, which only has thirty-three -- three deer (鹿) at eleven strokes each.

Popularity factor: 11

Ali:

Wierd, but I get a unicode error on that one kanji: http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=4BC2&useutf8=false

So what does the word mean?

Matt:

Maybe try it without the stuff after and including the ampersand? Or maybe your East Asian fonts just don't include the character. It's not exactly commonly used ;)

Unihan says it's pronounced "saan" or "ji" depending on where you are in China, and my dictionary says "shin" for Japanese. It means "many".. like.. "many horses". Allegedly. And the Unihan DB adds that it can also mean many horses travelling in a straight line.

Wyatt:

Man, I feel like such a loser in the presence of that kanji. That most intense character I know of to be used in Korean is 讚, which only has a meager 26 strokes.

Matt:

That's what you get for adopting a logical writing system. Suckers!

Of course, there's probably a Chinese-Chinese character in which 䯂 is just the upper right-hand corner (simplified version).

Anonymous:

Browsing the character palette in OS X, which unfortunately doesn't seem to have a "show by stroke count" option, I found 龘, which looks like about 48 strokes. I wonder what it means ...

Matt:

Three dragons! Sixteen strokes each for a total of 48! Monstrous.

According to unihan:

http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=9f98

it means "the appearance of a dragon walking". I don't know where that comes from.

Eric:

This post is hilarious because my browser just displays a giant question mark.

Diane:

Mine too. Argh! Firefox is confused...

Matt:

Sounds to me like you both have a case of Unicode Fever. And the only cure... is more fonts!

Quick! To the Installatory! Tim May linked to these two handy sites in a comment last month:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/
http://www.travelphrases.info/fonts.html

Eric:

Nah. I prefer to think that the single most stroke-intensive kanji in your entire dictionary is: ?

Anonymous:

Three dragons? Look at the last character in the second image on this page.

-- Tim May

2005-02-08