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I recall that when I began learning Mandarin, one of the things (!) that troubled me greatly was why the word for "thing" was written with the characters for "east" and "west":  dōngxi 東西.  My classmates came up with all sorts of outlandish, speculative explanations for the supposed etymology.  All along, I suspected that the meaning "thing" for the disyllabic word dōngxi 東西 was not derived from the characters used to write it but was the phonetic reflection of a borrowing or the representation of some colloquial, topolectal term.

From Mok Ling:

A friend of mine, Lucy, is in a Mandarin learning group. She told me about the bizarre etymology she was taught for the word dōngxi 東西. Apparently, 東西 being used to mean "thing, item" is based on the conception of the Five Phases (wǔxíng 五行 [VHM:  formerly translated as Five Agents or Five Elements, which brings out the correspondences with the Four Elements of Western classical thought, also in the metaphysics of Indian, Tibetan, and other cultures]): East is represented by the element of Wood (木) and West is represented by the element of Metal (金). Objects are made of metal and wood, therefore "east-west" became a shorthand "thing" — obviously pretty ridiculous.

I had no real competing theories, so I couldn't make a convincing counter-explanation. Looking it up on Google I found some other… "interesting" explanations on sites like Zhihu, such as "merchants selling things come from the east to the west". Everybody's so creative.

My next instinct was to look at parallel texts, so I cracked open Takekoshi's Contrast Text version of the 老乞大. 東西 seems to have been pretty commonly used as far back as the Yuan era, though some lines in the older editions notably have the expected wù 物 [VHM:  see separate note on this term below] to mean "thing":

【舊本老乞大 (~14C)】早來喫了乾物事，有些乾渴。(48/17b10-18a1)
【重刊老乞大 (1795)】吃了些乾東西，有些渴。(48/19b1

(I know the 老乞大* isn't the most reliable yardstick for dating vocabulary, but I thought I'd at least start there)

[*VHM:  This is actually one of my favorite Korean books.  Here's a note about it and a companion volume from Wikipedia:

Bak Tongsa (Chinese: 朴通事; lit. 'Pak the interpreter') was a textbook of colloquial northern Chinese published by the Bureau of Interpreters in Korea in various editions between the 14th and 18th centuries. Like the contemporaneous Nogeoldae ('Old Cathayan'), it is an important source on both Late Middle Korean and the history of Mandarin Chinese. Whereas the Nogeoldae consists of dialogues and focusses on travelling merchants, Bak Tongsa is a narrative text covering society and culture.]

I also found Zhengzhang Shangfang's paper titled 《Dōngxī tàn yuán sān tí 东西探源三题》 ("Three notes on the origin of 'dōngxi 東西'"). As I'm writing this I'm having a friend try and help me access the article on Wanfang Data because I don't have a Chinese phone number. Do you happen to know of any articles / papers written in English about this? Google's been completely overrun with SEO slop and other search engines aren't particularly useful for finding academic works.

VHM:  A note on the pre-dōngxi 東西 word for thing, wù 物 ("thing; object; matter; substance"):

Compare Proto-Sino-Tibetan *(m/b)rəw (“grain; seed; lineage”) (STEDT), whence Tibetan འབྲུ ('bru, “seed; grain”), Jingpho amyu (ə myú, “kind; sort”), Burmese မျိုး (myui:, “seed”). Within Sinitic, compare 苗 (OC *mrew, “seedling, sprout”), 麰 (OC *mu, “barley”).

(Wiktionary)

This proposed etymology of wù 物 does not match well the apparent structural origin of the glyph used to write it on the oracle bones, which is supposedly composed of 牛 ("bovine") as its semantaphore and 勿 ("do not; don't") as its phonophore. (Wiktionary)  The latter in turn allegedly depicts drops of blood on the blade of a knife; the original character of 刎 (OC *mɯnʔ, “to cut”) (phonetically borrowed for the negative particle since the time of the oracle bone script). (Wiktionary)

To wrap up this post on "thingness", in the early stages of my Mandarin education, I was repeatedly instructed that one of the most withering insults one could utter was "Nǐ bùshì gè dōngxī 你不是個東西 ("You are not a thing"), the idea being that "you [the person being insulted] are not even as worthy as a mere thing / object")!  Tant pis!

Selected readings

• "When did 'a thing' become a thing?" (4/18/16)
• "Not a gerund, not a thing" (3/5/10)

May 10, 2025 @ 4:30 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Vernacular

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