The character is historically composed of 儿 "legs", 田 representing a large demon's head and a curl looking similar to 厶 taken to represent a swirl of vapour, or a demon's tail.
The character can be traced to the oracle bone script, where it depicts a man kneeling on a monster head.
Most of the characters derived from the radical have meanings related to ghosts or souls, including 魔 "devil, demon", 魑 "black magic", 魘 "nightmare", 魄 "soul". In some signs, however, the radical is present purely as a phonetic marker, for example in 魏, the State of Wei during the Spring and Autumn period.
Variant forms
Kangxi Dict. Trad. Chinese (TW/HK/MO) Japanese Korean
Mainland China
鬼
鬼
Literature
Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram : the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN0-89659-774-1.
Li, Leyi: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN978-7-5619-0204-2
Harbaugh, Rick, Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, Yale University Press (1998), ISBN978-0-9660750-0-7.[1]
Childs-Johnson, Elizabeth (江伊莉), 甲骨文的“鬼”与假面具 (The Gui-Spirit in Oracle Bone Inscriptions), International Conference Celebrating the 95th Anniversary of the Discovery of Oracle Bone Inscriptions", Anyang, China, 1994.
GF 0011-2009 Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components prescribes 201 principle indexing components and 100 associated indexing components (in brackets) used in Simplified Chinese. Not all associated indexing components are listed above.
