Ghost (pinyin: guǐ) is a common Chinese word [1], which first appeared in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty [2]. Its ancient glyph looks like a monster with a big head. The original intention is that some religious or superstitious people think that people are souls after death. The ancients thought that "ghosts return", people die as ghosts, and people return to their hometown. Later, ghosts were regarded as the alienation of being a human being, such as Qu Yuan's Nine Songs of National Mourning and Soul Brave as a Ghost, which were all commendations. "Ghost" in modern Chinese is often used to refer to evil and horrible things, which is derogatory.
The ideographic Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi thinks that "ghost" comes from people, and its upper part is like a ghost head. Ghosts will harm people with yin stagnation, so they will never. Wang Yun thinks that ghost characters are pictographs, and their things are invisible to people. Sages all know about ghosts and gods, so there is no need to analyze them. Both Zhu He thought "Xu" was a phonetic symbol.
That is the first text of today's private talk. Judging from Oracle Bone Inscriptions (figure 1-3) and the inscriptions on the Western Zhou Dynasty (figure 4-6), the ghost character does not have the component of "mourning", but from the lower part, it is indeed a person, and from the upper part, it is "heaven", which symbolizes "ghost head", but it is not like a ghost head. The original meaning of the word ghost is that in primitive society and Shang and Zhou societies, people wear scary masks to represent ghosts in people's minds. Speaking of "ghosts", they turned out to be deformed people with big heads and small bodies. They were ugly and thought they were "ghosts". At the stage of Xiao Zhuan (Figure 8), the word "ghost" was stereotyped: the head of "ghost" became "field", and an apostrophe was added to "field" to indicate the protruding angle;
The lower part of Han Li's "ghost" character gradually changed into an "er" shape, and the ghost calligraphy and painting in the Warring States Qin Dynasty became 9, which was also done in the early Han Dynasty (figure 10). It's hard to say whether the component at the lower right of "Ghost" is "Mo", but it evolved from "Mo" in the middle and late Western Han Dynasty (figure 1 1, 12).