而

而 is a character that is hard to guess its current meaning. It's traditional version is the same as simplified one, thus we have to check it's ancient scripts to see if we can get more clues. Below image is taken from http://vividict.com

Evolution history of 而

From it oracle script , we can see that it's upper part is mouth (), thus its lower part  looks very likely long beard. And some other Oracle Script  simplified  into . When it came to Clerical Script , it kind of finalized its form as 而.

Ancient Chinese value their long beard as one of the important characteristics of a handsome man. For example 关羽 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Yu) who has a nickname as 美鬤公 , he even sometimes wear a special bag to protect his beard: Below is a Qing dynasty opera mask of Guan Yu:

Guan Yu with long beard

As  draws, man has lots of beard and it grow to a row，thus 而 can be used to represent the meaning of and.

Little beard does not look good. Lots of long beard together makes it impressive. thus 而 also has the meaning of progress further on top of the simply concatenation meaning of and. For example: 青，取之于蓝，而青于蓝

That is all for 而 today, let us enjoy a Chinese calligraphy with 而 inside:

博学而不穷，笃行而不倦。