Learn one Chinese Character a day – 女

From current writing of "女", it would be very hard to guess its meaning. Looking at its Oracle Scripts and the evolution history could help a lot. Below screen shot is taken from http://chinese-linguipedia.org :

Learn one Chinese Character a day – 女

Oracle Scriptis a lady sitting on her feet with arms crossing. Below is a drawing showing how it should looks like. Japanese and Korean are still following such tradition in their daily lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiza

女

Bronze Script is the lady  wearing a hairpin. A typical hairpin with its usage is shown below. It can be a proof that living standard during Bronze Script period had been improved a lot from Oracle Script period.

Hairpin

Clerical Script was very likely a continuation of from Warring State Era. It was then further transformed to our current way of writing - "女".

So "女" means a lady. 

"女" also means woman.

"女" can also be used to mean unmarried young girl. 

After "女" was created, it was used as a commonly used radical to help to create many more Chinese characters. We will see one in our next lesson.

Now it is time to enjoy a Chinese calligraphy as usual:

关关雎鸠，在河之洲。 窈窕淑女，君子好逑。