乌 | wū

In Mandarin Chinese, 乌 (Pinyin: wū 🔊 or wù 🔊) is either a noun meaning “crow”, “raven”, or “rook”, or an adjective for colour “black”. It looks like this latter meaning arose as a short for 乌黑, “black as a crow” (or a raven, or a rook, in Chinese it’s all the same).

乌 is a simplified form of the traditional character 烏, which evolved from a pictogram of a bird, just like 马 (remember it?) is a simplified form of 馬. Now to remember the difference between a crow and a horse...

Compounds of 乌 include

• 乌 + 木 = 乌木 (wūmù): ebony
• 乌 + 金 = 乌金 (wūjīn): “black gold”: ink or coal
• 乌 + 龙 + 茶 = 乌龙茶 (wūlóngchá): oolong tea (literally, “black dragon tea”)

Incidentally, the symbols above were created using black leaf tea.

More photos related to crows, tea and colour black @ Shutterstock.

黑 | hēi

In Mandarin Chinese, 黑 (Pinyin: hēi 🔊 or hè) means “black”, “dark”, and, by extension, “night”, “secret”, “illegal”, “evil” and so on. It also means “to hack” (in computing), from 黑客 (hēikè), a phonetic rendering of English hacker.

Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters:

The relevant bronzeware inscription form is 火 fire + an element combining a chimney along with specks representing soot → black/dark (soot).

However, Wiktionary calls the above interpretation “erroneous” and says that 黑 is a pictogram of a person (人) with a tattooed face,

depicting penal tattooing (墨), one of the five punishments of ancient China.

No, I don’t like this explanation at all. (Mind you, that was the least harsh punishment!)

More photos related to sesame, tattoos and colour black @ Shutterstock.