Amazing Chinese Characters (619) Darling - 卿

 The bronze script of character Darling is

There is a food container in the middle, two people are kneeled down face to face, ready to eat. The character is similar to character Village - 乡 (Post 191), let's see the shell bone script of character Village

The middle is food container, two people kneeled down and face to face. The major difference between the two characters is that the mouths in Darling are closed, the the mouths in Village are open. I think that the character Darling describes the picture before meal, the character Village describes the picture during eating. The close mouth of the two people in character Darling could be two of them speaking very gently, just like a falling in love couple conversations. The open big mouth in character Village means they talk loudly and enjoy the food more than the conversation.

The big seal script of character Darling is

The food container is in middle, and two people sit on two sides.

The small seal script of character Darling is

The middle food container has a difference support, two people are on two sides.

Let's compare the small seal script of character Darling with the small seal script of character Village

Both middle are same, but the sides are different. The Darling are two character Person, the Village are two character Town (Post 561), meaning the place where people live.  It is clear that there are more than two people share the food in character Village.

The clerical script of character Darling is

The middle part changed a lot, but still has some similarity to older scripts. the two sides are not similar to older scripts. The right part is simplified character Person, but the left part is not. However, if we remove the middle part, we get a character Enon and Mortise - 卯 (Post 469)

Which means "Close connected", "Perfect match", close to the situation: two people sit in a table to share food, indicating they are close friends, the meaning of character Darling. 

The character Darling was used often by Empire to call his ministers as "爱卿“ - Lovely Darling. Also there is proverb "卿卿我我“， which means "lovey-dovey", or two lovers sit very close and say love words each other.

The Pinyin of the character Darling is Qing1.

People use "亲爱的“ as Darling more often, especially in oral Chinese. 卿 is used in written Chinese occasionally right now.