The text is from the Guo Xiang recension, Wikisource · 莊子/秋水. The decompositions are from cjkvi-ids (CHISE IDS). The English glosses are from Unicode Unihan and from notes for this story.
Blog · plastron background 🐢
曳尾塗中
The king of Chu offers power to Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi refuses with a question. Does a sacred tortoise prefer to be dead and honored in a temple? Or does it prefer to be alive and drag its tail in the mud? Click a character in the passage to open its decomposition tree. You can open each node that has constituent parts.
About the trees
The trees show structural decompositions: how parts make the glyph. They are not full etymological histories. Some characters are atomic in the IDS database, and the tree shows them as leaves. Old pictographs such as 曳 are examples, although scholars discuss older origins. A node with the mark ◆ is a group of parts that has no character of its own. Its gloss gives the position of the parts (for example one part beside the other, or parts that overlap).
Some components are in the CJK extension blocks of Unicode. If your device has no font for them, the tree cannot draw them. For those components, the page draws the outline from GlyphWiki data, and the gloss gives the code point. A circled number is a component that Unicode does not encode. The number is its stroke count.
More from the dev log