矮 means shoot, 射 means short

矮 means shoot, 射 means short

The Chinese characters are meaning-oriented character system
mainly based on Xiangxing 象形 and Xingsheng 形聲 characters,
although also others such as 指事、會意、轉注、假借 characters.

We all have been told that it was the clever 倉頡 who invented or
created Chinese characters (or words) thousands of years ago. He
had tried hard to make his works perfect, but, once in a great while,
he made mistake too.

He was a social drinker, but he often drank a lot when he was invited
to a private social party. (We don’t blame on him, noting he had
worked so hard,) When he got drunk, he did make irrelevant
decision.

One day, he was drunk again, and he mixed up two words, which he
was to create. He made word “射“ to mean “shoot”, and “矮“ to mean
“short”. Now we realize there is problem with that:

As you can see, the word “射“, which indicates “寸身“, and it has to be
“short” instead of “shoot”. And the word “矮“, which indicates “委矢“,
and it is how you shoot, and should be “shoot” instead of "short".

Fortunately, he had not made too many of such mistakes. We still feel
thankful for his great invention or creation.

In English, sometime we type "short" for shoot, or "shoot" for short,
due to “typo”, typographical error, too. So we don’t blame on “倉頡“
for his “once in a great while” mistake.

So keep in mind, next time if you see words "矮" or "射" in any
Chinese text, remember "矮" means shoot, and "射" means short.

"矮" is actually 射, and "射" is actually 矮.

Yeh Tze