5 Easy Duplicated Chinese Characters

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As human civilization has undergone dramatic changes throughout the centuries, languages have adapted, and new words have been coined to meet the needs of our evolving societies. In Chinese, one of the ways that this process of lexical derivation has manifested itself is in the (re)duplication of characters.

To better understand how the doubling procedure works, let’s go over five illustrative examples:

人人

The character人 (rén; person) is easy to memorize because it looks exactly like a person walking with their legs stretched wide in mid-stride. And if duplicated? Person (人) plus person (人) implies everyone! This demonstrates how duplicated nouns can be used to refer to ‘all of’ something or all members of a group.

天天

This second example similarly involves the duplication of a noun. 天 (tiān), which depicts a person with arms and legs outstretched as if to embrace earth and sky, has multiple meanings, including “the heavens” and “fate/destiny,” but in this case, refers to “day.”

Unlike 人人 (everyone), which functions as a collective noun, 天天 can be used as an adjective or adverb to denote “everyday” or “daily.” To convey the same idea, i.e. ‘all of’ the days, you could also use 每天 (měi tiān), which translates to “every day.”

木木

Ordinarily, the character 木 (mù) signifies “tree” or “wood.” This makes sense because it abstractly resembles a thriving plant growing skyward with roots branching out beneath the ground’s surface. Unlike other nouns such as 人 and 天, 木 functions as an adjective when duplicated and is used figuratively to describe a dim-witted or idiotic person.

炎炎

An interesting example, 炎 (yán) is in itself a duplicated form of 火 (huǒ), which denotes “fire.”  Whereas 炎 can refer to “scorching heat” or “inflammation of the body” by extension, once duplicated all emphasis is put on the thermal connotation and the term equates to “blazing!”

For example:

赤日炎炎 (chì rì yán yán) = blazing sun

夏日炎炎 (xià rì yán yán) = blazing hot summer

明明

This final example represents a duplicated pair of closely related pictograms: 日 (rì), meaning “sun” or “day,” and 月 (yuè), meaning “moon” or “month.” Put together, the characters for these two celestial bodies form 明 (míng), which means “bright” or “clear.” And doubled up, 明 becomes 明明, which takes on the figurative meaning “plainly” or “clearly,” for example, as in “You clearly don’t trust him.” Because if something is doubly bright, it’s plain for all to see, right?

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