萍水相逢
píng shuǐ xiāng féng · HSK 7
strangers coming together by chance (idiom)
🌿💧 萍 duckweed + 水 water + 相 mutually + 逢 meet: drifting duckweed bumping together
Duckweed (萍) floats free on water (水) with no roots; two patches drift into each other (相逢) only by chance. The four characters literally read floating-water-mutually-meet, the perfect figure for strangers thrown together by luck.
水 — pictograph of flowing water
水 is a pictograph depicting a stream of flowing water, with the central line representing the main current and the side strokes showing splashing droplets or ripples. In oracle bone script it was drawn even more clearly as a wavy vertical line with branches. It retains its original meaning of 'water' and also serves as a radical, often appearing in the compressed form 氵.
逢 — walk radical 辶 + 夆 (phonetic)
逢 is a phonetic-semantic compound. The 辶 radical signals motion or going, while 夆 supplies the sound. Originally meaning 'to meet on the road,' it now broadly means 'to encounter' or 'to come upon.'