Yin and yang Da Cidian") enter "yangyin" *陽陰. While "yang" and "yin" can occur together in context, "yangyin" is not synonymous with "yinyang". The linguistic term "irreversible binomial" refers to a collocation of two words A-B that cannot be idiomatically reversed as B-A, for example, English "cat and mouse" (not *"mouse and cat") and "friend or foe" (not *"foe or friend"). Similarly, the usual pattern among Chinese binomial compounds is for positive A and negative B, where the A word is dominant or privileged over B, for example, "tiandi" 天地 "heaven and earth" and "nannü" 男女 "men and women". "Yinyang" meaning "dark and
Yin and yang 阳 "sunny side" are linguistically analyzable in terms of Chinese characters, pronunciations and etymology, meanings, topography, and loanwords. The Traditional Chinese characters and for the words "yīn" and "yáng" are both classified as radical- esphonetic characters, combining the semantically significant "mound; hill" radical or with the phonetic indicators "ying" and "yang" . The first phonetic "yīn" "cloudy" ideographically combines "jīn" "now; present" and "yún" "cloud", denoting the "今 presence of 云 clouds". The second phonetic "yáng" "bright" originally pictured the "sun" with "rays coming down". This phonetic is expanded with the "sun" radical into "yáng" 暘 "rising sun; sunshine". The