陽

yáng

The active, male principle; light; warmth; the sunny side of a mountain.

Meaning

Concrete/Geographic: Exposure to sunlight; specifically the south side (sunny slope) of a mountain or hill.
Environmental/Sensory: Light, brightness, warmth, and the hours of daylight. It typically describes the quality of illumination rather than the celestial body itself.
Cosmological/Philosophical: The active, expansive principle in binary opposition to 陰 (yīn). This includes associations with hardness, heat, ascension, masculinity, and exteriority. In early texts, "active" often specifically denotes an outward-moving or expansive nature.
Anatomical/Medical: The dorsal side of the body (the back), superficial layers of skin and muscle, and specific meridians.

Modifier: Frequently functions as an adjective to characterize a noun as expansive, warm, or bright.
Binary Opposition: Operates in conceptual dialogue with 陰 (yīn); the presence of 陽 often implies the conceptual opposite even if 陰 is not explicitly written.

Contrast with 明 (míng): Where 明 emphasizes clarity, visibility, or intelligence (the result of light), 陽 emphasizes the source and the heat.

Variants: Variants (including U+6C1C) primarily reflect different renderings of the "sun" component (昜). These are orthographic shifts related to scribal hand or period and do not signal a change in meaning.

In texts concerning geography or architecture, prioritize directional and thermal senses over philosophical abstractions.
In technical medical contexts, "male principle" is usually an incorrect reading; prefer "exterior" or "posterior."

Decontextualized translator aid. This page describes plausible lexical range; it does not choose what the glyph means in a particular passage.