Hair knot

髻 means a hair knot or bun. In Mandarin it's jì — a hairstyle coiled at the crown or back of the head, written in compounds like 髮髻 and its simplified form 发髻. The character pairs the hair component 髟 with 吉, which supplies the sound.

The hairstyle is older than its written record: the Taiwan Ministry of Education's character dictionary lists 髻 as absent from the original headword list of 說文, an early Chinese character dictionary, while later-added material glosses it as “hair gathered together.” In early China, bound hair and headgear could signal adulthood and social rank and carry political meaning.

How is 髻 used differently in Chinese and Japanese?

Chinese and Japanese attach it to different hairstyles. Chinese compounds use it for the knot itself; Japanese dictionaries record the readings motodori and tabusa for gathered hair, and mizura for an old men's style with loops beside the ears.

髻華 makes the placement grammar visible: 髻 names the knot and 華 names an ornament set into the hair or onto a crown at that knot. Chinese dictionaries also record 結 as an older interchangeable form of 髻.

What does 髻 mean when someone sends it alone?

Its meaning depends on the surrounding language and sentence. In a Chinese hairstyle discussion it points to a bun; in one passage of the Zhuangzi (莊子), an ancient Chinese philosophical text, it names the kitchen god instead. Ask which language and sentence it came from before reading it.