# Cantonese swearing characters and other Chinese neologisms **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 11, 2009, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cantonese-swearing-characters-and-other-chinese-neologisms/480790 "2009-01-11T10:30:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2009, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cantonese-swearing-characters-and-other-chinese-neologisms/480790/1 "2009-01-11T10:30:01Z")
When I lived in Hong Kong, I was aware that key Cantonese swear words - and the Cantos _love_ to swear; they are masters of the art - were officially unwriteable. There simply weren’t the characters to do it. And yet, I noticed graffiti that was using character neologisms that represented key swear words. Many of these were a benign character inserted into the word for door - 門 (_mun_). The implication being that this mutates the sound of the benign word into a taboo one. The most obvious one was _diu_ - “to fuck”. The character comprised the word for small - 小 (_siu_) inserted into 門. Another one was the word for west - 西 (_sai_) inside 門, which made it into _hai_, or “cunt”. A brief search reveals [this site](http://www.cantonese.ca/swearing.php) which has a few of these ‘door’ characters - including a third one for _lun_, “fucking”, which uses a character that I recognise but can’t remember. Is it a simplified dragon - 龍 (_loong_) or am I barking up the wrong tree? Note that the site uses images rather than Unicode characters. Does anyone know if this phenomenon has been documented anywhere? Anyone know how old these characters are - are they actually neologisms or are they ancient but taboo? Am I correct in assuming that these are not official, and therefore haven’t been encoded into official character sets? Finally, what is the mechanism for charater neologisms? When a new character arises, or is officially coined, how long before Unicode etc. incorporates it? Is there a schedule? Or are neologisms ignored in favour of word combining to express new concepts? ---
**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2009, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cantonese-swearing-characters-and-other-chinese-neologisms/480790/2 "2009-01-11T11:27:42Z")
Not sure about the swearing aspects, but that third character, [能](http://translate.google.com/translate_t#zh-CN%7Cen%7C%E8%83%BD), means “can” (as in “being able to”). ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2009, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cantonese-swearing-characters-and-other-chinese-neologisms/480790/3 "2009-01-11T11:30:11Z")
Hmm… “_nang_” - doesn’t sound much like _lun_, so there’s 33.3333% of my theory out of the water. ---
**Author:** ![Waffle\_Decider](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/77aa72/32.png) [@Waffle\_Decider](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waffle_Decider)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2009, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cantonese-swearing-characters-and-other-chinese-neologisms/480790/4 "2009-01-11T15:24:29Z")
Native Cantonese speaker here… These characters belong to the “Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set”, and they are now officially incorporated into Unicode. They are not universally used on the Internet, however, because they are standardised relatively late. On most computers, the user needs to install additional software in order to view and input them. [Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKSCS) [Microsoft](http://www.microsoft.com/HK/hkscs/) These characters have been in use for a long time. I was quite familiar with them while growing up in the 80s and early 90s. 😃 They follow a path of development similar to other non-swearing Cantonese characters. The Wiki article on [written Cantonese](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese) should provide more info on the mechanism at work. 𨶙 (門+能) actually means “penis” literally, but more vulgar. It is like the masculine version of “cunt”. Its pronunciation is lan2, compared to nang4 for 能. If you consider the tendency for younger speakers to mispronounce n and the -ng ending, they do sound pretty similar.