CJK Ideograph 巳

Read 巳 as the Snake branch in a traditional calendar.

The twelve Earthly Branches work with the ten Heavenly Stems in a cycle used to mark dates. The system's earliest evidence is on Shang oracle bones around 1350 BCE, where it marked days; later records use the cycle for years, months, hours, and directions.

The glyph's path is not a single clean invention. In Shang–Western Zhou inscriptions, the sixth branch was written with 子 in the references reviewed by Japan's National Diet Library, and 巳 later replaced it. Paleographic sources still debate whether the ancient shape shows a fetus or a snake.

What else has 巳 meant?

The branch label is only one layer of the character's history.

In early bronze inscriptions, the graph also appears as a shortened form of 祀, the ritual-sacrifice word, and in 已-like uses such as “finish” or “already.” Those are historical readings, not default meanings for a modern standalone message.

In Japanese, the zodiac reading is み (mi). As of 2024, Japanese use included 巳年 on New Year cards and 巳の日 or 己巳 in shrine and fortune contexts, where the sign can carry auspicious associations.

Which character is 巳, not 已 or 己?

Use 巳 for the branch; do not swap it with 已 or 己.

巳 and 已 share old writing history, which explains why reference works discuss overlap. Modern text uses 已 for “already” or “finished”; 己 is a different character that can appear beside 巳 in a stem-branch name such as 己巳.

If someone sends a bare 巳, read it provisionally as a calendar or zodiac reference. If the surrounding sentence is ordinary prose, ask for context rather than silently changing it to a more familiar lookalike.