0052 細

細

This is the character meaning ‘narrow, thin, slender, dainty, fine.’ It’s pronounced SAI or hosoi in Japanese and xì in Chinese. The left-hand element

糸

means ‘thread,’ and the right-hand element

田,

though altered by scribes to match the character for ‘field,’ came from a character that meant and still does mean ‘skull, top of the head, fontanel’:

囟    (archaic form)

That’s why the ‘skull’ character also shows up in

思    (archaic form),

‘to think,’ made up (rather graphically) of a head and a heart. Thus, thread was similar to the hairs on the head, very thin or fine. From the archaic character

it looks the ‘thread’ element is derived from some sort of spindle that holds the thread. Wieger says that the two round balls are silkworm cocoons, and that very fine silk was spun by combining threads from only two cocoons. The three lines on the bottom represent the threads as they are being twisted together. Wieger says that this element

厶

represents a cocoon. There are two of these nested in the character for ‘thread’ 糸 shown above.