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
Taijitu the "yin and yang symbol", itself popularly called "taijitu", represents the second of these five parts of the diagram. The term "taijitu" in modern Chinese is commonly used to mean the simple "divided circle" form (), but it may refer to any of several schematic diagrams that contain at least one circle with an inner pattern of symmetry representing yin and yang. While the concept of yin and yang dates to Chinese antiquity, the interest in "diagrams" (圖 "tú") is an intellectual fashion of Neo-Confucianism during the Song period (11th century), and it declined again in the Ming period, by