According to Xu Shen's explanation, the word "Peng" means "ancient prose" (here "ancient prose" refers to pictographs). That is to say, the word "Peng" is a variant of the word "Feng" in Phoenix. In the ancient hieroglyphics of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the word Peng really looks like a big bird with open wings. The two moons are actually two wings. In ancient Chinese, the pronunciations of "Feng" and "Peng" were similar (in ancient times, the initials "P" and "F" were probably the same. For example, the word "concubine" has two pronunciations: one is to pronounce "concubine" as a noun, meaning spouse, and later refer to the emperor's concubine and the prince's wife; The second is to read "Pei", remove the sound and use it as a verb, meaning marriage and marriage. In fact, the two pronunciations of this word were later separated due to the development and change of language, and may be the same pronunciation at first), so the variant of the word "Feng" is regarded as a friend of "cronies" and "friends". Of course, borrowing is not only because of the similar pronunciation, but also because the meaning of the word has an explanation: "Fengfei, a group of birds from ... so they think this is a cronyism word." From this point of view, "friends" originally meant to live in groups, so there is a saying in Shan Hai Jing: "Birds live in groups, friends fly in groups", and friends fly in groups, and then this "friend" evolved into the meaning of friends.

The word "friend" has another source. It is an ancient monetary unit. There was a history of using shells as money in ancient times, so there was a treasure. The pictographic word "Bao" is called "Kun", which probably refers to vessels made of jade, and later evolved into the traditional Chinese character "Jian", which refers to all precious things. Two shells are friends —— There is a saying in The Book of Songs that Xiaoya is in Beijing, Zhejiang and Hubei: "I am a hundred friends when I meet a gentleman." "Give me one hundred friends" means giving me one hundred friends money. Friends are two shells, so the two halves of the word "friend" may be hieroglyphics of "shell" and later simplified as "moon" Does this friend, as a monetary unit, have any connection with friends of friends? Yes Two shells are juxtaposed shells, and this juxtaposition is another meaning of the word "friend" of a friend: "equality", "similarity" and "equivalence". , refers to the elements of the relationship between two or more people as friends, and the aforementioned "family friends" refers to this meaning.

The word friend has long existed in our Chinese. There is a saying in the Book of Changes that "a gentleman teaches with his friends". There is also a famous saying in The Analects that "making friends is not credible". However, what the ancients called "friends" is not the same as what we call friends now. The word "friend" we are talking about now is a concept, which refers to people who have friendship with each other and are friendly to each other. In the era of the Book of Changes and The Analects of Confucius, general nouns were rarely expressed in two words. The word "friend" is two concepts. According to the ancients' explanation, "classmates call friends, comrades call friends", and "classmates" are people who study under the same teacher, so "friends" are what we call classmates now; Of course, the so-called "comrade" is not the "revolutionary comrade" we are talking about now, but refers to people who are like-minded and can get along well, so this "friend" is our concept of "friend" now. In other words, the "friends" mentioned in the Book of Changes and The Analects of Confucius are equivalent to what we now call "classmates and friends".

According to China's first dictionary, Shuo Wen Jie Zi (compiled by Xu Shen, a scholar and writer in the Eastern Han Dynasty, from the 12th year of Han Yongyuan (A.D. 100) to the first year of Andy's Jianguang (A.D. 12 1 year)), the word "friend" means that you are friends according to the glyph. Duan Yucai in Qing Dynasty (born in Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty, whose Annotation on Explaining Words can be called a masterpiece handed down from Xu Shen, which has not been written for 7,000 years) thought: "Two good things, two good brothers and good friends, and two people are both right-hand men", which is an explanation of Xu Shen's "intersection from two things". In other words, the two "you" that make up the word "you" are like two people, two brothers, and brothers live in harmony, which is called "friends"; He also believes that the word "you" is like two hands, a person's right hand and left hand.

In fact, Duan Yucai interpreted the two halves of the word "friend" as two people, saying that these two people are two brothers, which is a bit far-fetched. Two people are brothers? Aren't you the enemy? We think it may be more accurate to say that the word "you" is two hands. But this should not be a person's two hands. A person's two hands, what feelings, friendship? Isn't there a popular joke that "holding your wife's hand is like holding your right hand with your left hand"? That means "I can't find my feelings" and I don't like it. Therefore, one should not use the right hand to explain the meaning of the word "friend".

Judging from the ancient glyph of the word "friend", the two parts that make up the word really look like two hands. However, these are two hands of two people-friendship and friendship only exist between people. Let's imagine, what do these two hands symbolize? Perhaps it is the hand-in-hand of a soul mate, the hand-in-hand of love at first sight, the hand-in-hand on the road of life, the high-five and high-five when promised, the "helping hand" when in danger, or the reluctant wave when leaving ... Are these not our understanding and feelings about friendship, friendship and friendship through the ages?