力 · lì
力 · lì
Character · Power
What it means
Force, strength — the plainest power word in the language. Two strokes and no mysticism: muscle, effort, the energy you actually spend.
力：力气、力量。汉语里最朴素的能量词——两画，不玄：肌肉、气力，你实际拿得出来的那部分。
Where the character comes from
The Shuowen glosses it as 筋也, sinew — the cable inside the body that does the pulling. Another reading takes the oracle-bone form as a ploughshare: the tool that turned the soil, which would make this the character of work itself. Either way the word stayed earthbound. 身力, horsepower, the strength of a pen — when the language means power that gets spent rather than possessed, it reaches for this character.
Oracle-bone form: a bent-shaft digging stick or ploughshare (the farming-tool reading), or a flexed sinew (the Shuowen reading). Two strokes have carried both images for three thousand years.
- Official historyShuowen Jiezi力部
- Official historyOracle bone script
How it is used today — and how often
Extremely common: HSK level 1, among the first hundred characters a child learns. On skin it reads as plain effort rather than superpower — pair it with that expectation and it will not disappoint.
How it gets misread
力 read as 刀 or 九 → 力
The hooked stroke turns left and down; in 刀 it hooks the other way and the dot sits differently. From a distance all three are the same gesture.
Before you ink
Two strokes, one gesture. It holds at 2–4 cm — wrist, behind the ear, inner forearm. Small is fine; just keep the second stroke inside the frame.
The silhouette is one hooked stroke away from 刀 and 九 — check the turn before you commit. The graph is also identical to Japanese 力（ちから）; if that reading bothers you, the seal-script form keeps it unmistakably Chinese.