11 Which Way to Halloween? 🚶♀️⛏️🚶♀️
11 Which Way to Halloween? 🚶♀️⛏️🚶♀️
🫧💭 toil and trouble! Halloween is just around the corner — have you picked out a costume yet?
Hello everyone! As we’re nearing the end of the spookiest month of 2022, we wanted to revisit a classic Halloween costume in case some of you are still looking for a costume for the big day…
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
This week’s hanmoji is:
🚶♀️⛏️🚶♀️
What do you think this emoji combination represents in Chinese? The answer is a single written Chinese character, and it’s a common, classic “thing” people dress up as for Halloween.
Still stumped? What if we shifted the emoji around to better match the original Chinese character:
Hint: What can you dress up as for Halloween, where you will be toying with people, with their lives hanging by a balance?
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🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🚶♀️⛏️🚶♀️ stands for 巫 (wū/mou4), which means witch, wizard or shaman. It’s made of the characters 人 (rén/jan4), or person, surrounded by 工 (gōng/gung1), or work.
To refer to a woman witch, people usually say 巫婆 (wūpó/mou4 po4) or 女巫 (nǚwū/neoi5 mou4), which transliterates to “witchy woman/matron” and “girl/woman witch”.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We’ve been nominated for a Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award. Tell your Canadian grade schoolers (and teachers) to take a look at the books and vote for their favorites!
We’re running multiple workshops at FOLD Kids this November!
Our book is now out — order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, 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 order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.