Not, Non-

Interesting Fact

The original 不 was not a negative word. Ancient Chinese scribes used it to depict the calyx of a flower—the leafy structure underneath the petals. 🌸 Later, the character was borrowed purely for its sound and began being used as a grammatical word meaning "not." The original flower meaning disappeared from everyday use, but the character survived as one of the most important negative words in Chinese and Japanese. So every time you read 不安, 不可能, or 不変, you're using a character that began life as a piece of a flower.