0055 売

売

This character means ‘to sell, to be in demand.’ It is pronounced BAI and uru (or ureru) in Japanese and mài in Chinese. It seems hard to explain because it’s a ‘cursive remnant’ of a more complicated figure, and the remaining strokes don’t really give much indication of the original idea. The upper figure

士

today, on it’s own, means ‘a gentleman, scholar, soldier, samurai.’ However, it is probably an alteration of a figure that means ‘to take, carry away.’

The lower figure

㓁

may be a net, in which one carries away things to be sold.

That’s all pretty hazy and hard to see (and Japanese doesn’t have the net character), so I’ll make up my own story about a gentleman carrying around a little table

冖

with his son (or on his own two legs)

儿

so they (or he) can sell things at the market. (That is the actual character for ‘son’ in Chinese, though in Japanese it’s just known as the ‘legs’ radical and is not used to mean ‘son.’)

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COTD diary note: On p. 93 in my edition of 雪国, Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata, he uses the word 大事, daiji, which means ‘important, valuable, serious matter.’ 事, JI, meaning ‘thing, matter, business, affair,’ was featured in COTD 0043. 大, dai, means ‘big, large.’