蛛 | zhū

In Mandarin Chinese, 蛛 (Pinyin: zhū 🔊) means “spider”. According to Wiktionary, 蛛 is a phono-semantic compound of semantic 虫 (“insect”) and phonetic 朱 (zhū), while Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters that “the conceptual influence lent here by 朱 is uncertain”.

There are not too many compounds of 蛛. One of them is 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū 🔊) which is another word for spider. In Chinese, the 蜘 part is not used on its own; in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese 蜘 also means “spider”. So does the reduplicated form, 蛛蛛 (zhūzhu). A compound of 蛛 with 网 “net”, 蛛网 (zhūwǎng), means “spider web”.

In Japanese, 蜘蛛 is pronounced kumo (🔊).

蜘蛛何と 音を何と鳴く 秋の風 芭蕉 Kumo nan to oto wo nan to naku aki no kaze With what voice, And what song would you sing, spider, In this autumn breeze? Bashō (Translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to spiders, calligraphy and sea glass @ Shutterstock.