In Mandarin Chinese, 夏 (Pinyin: xià 🔊) means “summer”. There are other, mostly obsolete, meanings of this word. Just to be sure that they are really talking about summertime, the Chinese use compounds with 季 “season”, 夏季 (xiàjì), or 天 “day”, 夏天 (xiàtiān). Some other compound words of 夏 include
- 夏 + 仲 = 仲夏 (zhòngxià): midsummer
- 夏 + 历 / 曆 = 夏历 / 夏曆 (xiàlì): Chinese calendar
- 金 + 春 + 沙 = 金夏沙 (Jīnxiàshā): purely phonetic rendering of Kinshasa (the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo)
With ten strokes, 夏 is the most complex hanzi of the four seasons. According to Wiktionary, it all started with
an ideogrammic compound: 日 (“sun”) + 頁 (“head; man”) — man under the scorching sun; summer.
A number of modifications ensued until the character reached its current shape.
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