引人人胜
yǐn rénrén shèng · HSK 7
People win
🏆 引 pull + 人 person + 人 person + 胜 win → people pull ahead to win
Read it as a chain: 引 (pull/draw) leads two 人 (person, person) toward 胜 (victory). The repeated 人 marks the crowd of people, and 胜 sounds like shèng, the same shèng in 胜利 victory.
引 — bow 弓 + vertical stroke 丨
A compound ideograph showing a bow 弓 with a vertical line 丨 representing the drawn bowstring. The original meaning was 'to draw a bow,' which extended to 'pull,' 'lead,' 'guide,' and 'cite.' The vertical stroke depicts the action of pulling the string back.
人 — pictograph of a standing person
人 is a pictograph showing a person viewed from the side, with two strokes representing the legs and torso of a standing human. In oracle bone script it clearly depicted a figure leaning slightly forward. The meaning has remained 'person' or 'human' throughout its history.
人 — pictograph of a standing person
人 is a pictograph showing a person viewed from the side, with two strokes representing the legs and torso of a standing human. In oracle bone script it clearly depicted a figure leaning slightly forward. The meaning has remained 'person' or 'human' throughout its history.
胜 — flesh 月 (肉) + 生 sheng phonetic
胜 is a semantic-phonetic compound: the 月 (originally 肉 'flesh/meat') element gave it an early meaning related to raw or rank-smelling meat, while 生 supplied the sound. In modern Chinese it was adopted as the simplified form of 勝, meaning 'to win' or 'to surpass', so today it almost always carries that victory sense.