齿亡舌存

齿亡舌存 in English

chǐ wáng shé cún: (idiom) The teeth eventually fall out, while the softer tongue remains. It illustrates the idea that rigidity breaks easily, whereas flexibility helps one survive.

Character breakdown

齿齒 chǐ tooth
亡 wáng to die
舌 shé tongue
存 cún to exist

Stroke order

Le caractère 亡 tracé avec le numéro de chaque trait à son point de départ — Numbered strokes

Stroke-by-stroke animation of the character 亡

Stroke data from Make Me a Hanzi, derived from the Arphic PL fonts under the Arphic Public License.

Le caractère 存 tracé avec le numéro de chaque trait à son point de départ — Numbered strokes

Stroke-by-stroke animation of the character 存

Stroke data from Make Me a Hanzi, derived from the Arphic PL fonts under the Arphic Public License.

How it used to be written

齿

These are the forms of 齒, the traditional character: 齿 is a twentieth-century simplification, found in no ancient corpus.

Oracle bone script 商
Clerical script 東漢
See all 18 forms

亡

Oracle bone script 商
Clerical script 東漢
See all 13 forms

舌

Oracle bone script 商
Clerical script
See all 10 forms

存

Small seal script
Clerical script 東漢
See all 6 forms

Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica, public domain (CC0).

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