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Cinnabar Ink

Find out what it means before the needle does.

Every entry here is checkable: where the character came from, whether the history books kept it, what the folk say about it, and what a stranger will read it as. Free, in full.

What an entry holds

The character large, its pinyin and English gloss, how the glyph evolved, the classical source it comes from, current usage, where it sits on a body, the caveats, and a link to any design that uses it.

The meaning is yours whether you buy or not