Amazing Chinese Characters (661) The ninth of Heavenly Stems - 壬

 Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches together form a Chinese calendar circle. There are ten characters in Heavenly Stems, the ninth is the character we are discussing. There twelve characters in Earthly Branches. They pair up to form 60 pairs to count the years. It is difficult and unnecessary to go detail of this system, we just need to know, the character we discuss right now is one of Heavenly Stems.

The shell bone script of character of Then ninth of Heavenly Stems is

which is character Work (Post 465),  it is ancient mortise-tenon structure

The bronze script of character The ninth of Heavenly Stems is

Similar to shell bone script, except the dot in the middle of the vertical bar. The dot is an indicator, which indicates someone holds the mortise-tenon structure in the middle to assemble the structure. 

The big seal script of The ninth of Heavenly Stems is 

Similar to bronze script.

The small seal script of The ninth of Heavenly Stems is

Similar to older scripts, except the dot in the middle becomes a horizontal line. 

The clerical script of character The ninth of Heavenly Stems

Similar to small seal script except the top stroke becomes a little falling left stroke, which is to distinguish the character from character King - 王.

The Pinyin of the character is Ren2.

The original meaning of the character - working with mortise - tendon structure is disappeared. It is only used to be the ninth of Heavenly Stems. I don't know why.