A face drawn head-on: two horns sweeping up and outward, framed by the single vertical stroke of the muzzle. The scribes needed only a few strokes to tell an ox from its curly-horned cousin 羊 (sheep), whose horns curl the other way, inward and down. For three thousand years the ox was the engine of the farming kingdom: it pulled the plow that broke the earth in 男, the field-worker.
A piece of culture
The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl China's most romantic legend rides on this character: 牛郎, the Cowherd, was a poor orphan whose only companion was an old ox — who turned out to be an immortal in disguise. The ox helped him marry Zhinü, a weaver-girl goddess who had fallen in love with him from the heavens. When the gods tore the couple apart, forcing Zhinü back across the Milky Way, magpies took pity and formed a bridge with their wings so the lovers could meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. That night, the Qixi Festival — China's Valentine's Day — is still celebrated by looking up at the stars Altair and Vega, said to be the cowherd and the weaver girl themselves.
Use it in a real word
水牛
shuǐniú · seoi2 ngau4
water buffalo — literally "water ox", the animal that works the flooded rice paddies you met in 田