We’re back after an extended summer break. And just in time too, as the paperback edition of our book comes out in just two weeks! Wait… did we forget to mention that a paperback edition was on the way?
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your regular 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
You know the drill: look at the combination of emoji below, and guess what it represents in Chinese writing. In the case of the two below, they form the upper and lower halves of a Chinese character — what do you think this character means?
💀
❤️
Hint: What happens when something dies in your heart?
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
💀
❤️ stands for 忘, which is pronounced wàng in Mandarin, and mong4 in Cantonese. The top-half, 亡, means to die, lose, be gone or flee. So we think the skull emoji 💀 is a pretty fitting representation of it. As for the bottom, 心, it truly does mean heart ❤️, but can also be used to refer to a person’s mind or intention (much like the way heart is used in English). Having said all that, we will ask one final time: What happens when something dies in your heart?
We forget it. 忘 means to forget or to overlook.
Fun fact: the top half, 💀 亡, is pronounced exactly the same as 💀❤️忘 (wàng in Mandarin and mong4 in Cantonese). This means that 💀 亡 influences both the character’s meaning and its pronunciation.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
SHOP Cooper Hewitt selected our book to accompany their Give Me a Sign 2023-2024 exhibition.
The paperback edition comes out on October 17 in the US and Canada, and on November 2 in the UK.
But until the, you can get our hardcover edition 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.