BeginChinese
every character tells a story
The ancient form
Today

yǒu · jau5

to have; there is

Where it comes from

A hand reaching down closes around a piece of meat — the ancient sign for having something worth holding onto. That lower shape is the very crescent you already know as 月, moon: inside other characters it often quietly means "flesh" instead, exactly as promised back when you first met the moon. To have, in the oldest Chinese, began as meat in the hand.

A piece of culture

Being and non-being
Laozi paired the character you just learned with its opposite, 无 (not-having, non-being), in one of the most quoted passages of the Daodejing: thirty spokes meet at a hub, but it is the emptiness at the center that lets the wheel turn; clay is shaped into a bowl, but it is the hollow inside that holds the soup; doors and windows are cut into a wall, but it is the empty space that makes the room livable. His conclusion: 有之以为利,无之以为用 — "what is present, 有, gives the benefit; what is absent, 无, gives the use." Two and a half thousand years later, 有 (yǒu) and 没有 (méiyǒu, "not have") are still among the first words any learner of Chinese needs.

Use it in a real word

有心
yǒuxīn ·
thoughtful; to have the intention — literally "have heart"; you already know 心
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