08 Good morning equinox! 🌅
Hello everyone! September 22 is here with the equinox — fall equinox in the north and spring equinox in the south. The equinox is when the amount of day time is equal to the amount of night time, and it happens twice a year. For this issue’s hanmoji puzzle, we have a shining example of a greeting that will help you anywhere you go.
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
🧩 This week’s puzzle
If you remember from Issue 04, we talked about the sun and moon radicals. There are many ways to represent 日 (rì/jat6), or sun, in emoji, and in that issue we chose ☀️, but there are many different emoji for sun.
Every morning in China, people say the word to each other as they start their days:
☀️
➕
Can you guess what this means (hint: it’s only a single character!)?
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
☀️
➕ stands for 早 (zǎo/zou2), which means morning.
If you’ve ever sent 🌅to say “good morning” to someone, you’re also sending a little sun as a greeting. One fun way to remember the 十(➕) in 早 is that it looks like the sun rising from the ground.
One story behind the character is that the 十(➕) is the germinating seed that blooms into a plant that then pushes up the 日(☀️).
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We are running a workshop at the Toronto International Festival of Authors this Sunday.
Our book is now out — order it now onIndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely pre-order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.