We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
A ten-character ordinal series.
Also known as: Ten stems, Celestial stems
The Chinese series of ten characters used as an ordinal sequence and as the first element of the sexagenary cycle.
Provides a ten-place ordinal series and the first element of each sexagenary pair.
Contexts: History, Public information
Works in ordinary modern Chinese the way A, B, C works in English: options on a form, grades of a product and parties to a contract are labelled with the first few stems, so the series is live administrative notation and not only calendrical.
Contexts: History, Public information
Pairs with the five phases two stems at a time, giving each phase a yang and a yin stem, which is the structure behind the elemental year names — a wood-yang year, a wood-yin year, and so on through sixty.
Contexts: History, Public information
A fixed run of ten written characters in an unvarying order, each a single glyph of few strokes.
The cycle this series is half of.
The twelve-character series the stems are run against.