鸦雀无声
yā què wú shēng · HSK 7
absolute silence
🐦🤫 鸦 crow + 雀 sparrow + 无 no + 声 sound = even the birds go quiet
Four characters stack literally: crow, sparrow, without, sound. When the two noisiest birds both fall silent, the room has dropped to absolute stillness, so the idiom means dead quiet, not a single voice heard.
无 — top 一 + 林-like middle + fire radical 灬 below
Originally a pictograph of a person dancing while holding ornaments or tassels, meaning 'to dance' — the ancestor of 舞. It was borrowed phonetically to write the negative 'not have / without,' and the dance meaning was reassigned to 舞 with an added foot element. The simplified form 无 comes from an ancient variant.
声 — 士 scholar/warrior on top + 尸-like form + components (simplified from 聲)
声 is the simplified form of 聲, which originally depicted a hanging stone chime (殸) being struck, with 耳 'ear' below to show hearing. The full form combined the sound-making instrument and the act of listening, meaning 'sound' or 'voice'. The modern simplified 声 keeps only the upper portion.