力/雞 · lì / jī
力/雞 · lì / jī
Phrase · Easily misread
What it means
Not one entry but a pair: the two characters whose difference is one stroke, and what actually separates them on skin.
不是一条，是一对：差一笔的两个字，以及在皮肤上真正把它们分开的是什么。
Where the character comes from
力 is two strokes and means force. 雞 is the traditional form of 鸡 and carries the 又 hand radical. They are unrelated in meaning and adjacent in the way people mishear things. The difference is not the stroke count — it is that one is a whole character and one is a word for an animal.
力 from ploughing; 雞 from 奚 phonetic plus 隹 (short-tailed bird). Only the simplified 鸡 retains the bird radical at all.
- Official historyShuowen Jiezi
How it gets misread
力 read as 刀 or 九 → 力
The hooked stroke turns left and down; in 刀 it hooks the other way and the dot sits differently. From a distance all three are the same gesture.
雞 written as 鷄 → 雞
鷄 is a variant form with the same meaning. Either is defensible; mixing them within one string is not.
Before you ink
One stroke apart means nothing to a reader who does not read Chinese. What carries is the whole silhouette — and the second stroke of 力 sits inside the frame of the character, not outside it.
This is the most useful single lesson on the site: a tattooist freehanding hanzi will not be caught by a wrong character a foreign client can read, but they will be caught by the outline.