夫 fū is a pictograph built on 大 dà, the figure of a standing person seen from the front. Above the outstretched 大 a single horizontal stroke marks a hairpin run through the topknot. In early society a man bound up his hair and pinned it when he came of age, so the added stroke turns the generic person into a grown, capped adult: a man who has reached maturity. The simplified and traditional forms are identical, four strokes that have changed little across the script's long history.

From that core image of the adult man, the senses fan out, and the character also carries a second, literary reading. The everyday reading fū spans three related fields:

1. Husband. The grown man as one half of a married pair: 丈夫 zhàngfu (husband), 夫妻 fūqī (husband and wife), 夫人 fūrén (madam, a man's wife), 夫妇 fūfù (a married couple).
2. An adult man, a laborer. A man defined by his work: 农夫 nóngfū (farmer), 渔夫 yúfū (fisherman), 车夫 chēfū (cart driver). Note that 大夫 read dàifu means doctor, a special colloquial reading.
3. Skill, the effort that mastery takes. 功夫 gōngfu (skill, craft, kung fu) and 工夫 gōngfu (time and effort spent), where the man's labor becomes the work itself.

The second reading is fú, a particle of classical and literary Chinese. At the head of a sentence it works as a soft opener, "now, as for," signalling that a general statement or reflection is about to follow; mid-sentence or at the close it can point like "this, that." It carries no concrete meaning of its own, only a measured, essayistic tone. A learner meets it most in 论语 and 道德经 style prose, almost never in modern speech.

The warmest face of 夫 is the husband, the grown man as one half of a marriage. 丈夫 zhàngfu is the plain everyday word for one's husband. Pair the man with the wife and you get the couple seen from two angles: 夫妻 fūqī, husband and wife as a unit, and 夫妇 fūfù, a more formal pairing of the same idea. 夫人 fūrén, finally, is the polite term for another man's wife, "madam" or "lady," a word of respect rather than of intimacy. Together they map the married man from the inside (my husband) out to the formal (so-and-so's wife).

Strip away the marriage and 夫 is simply the grown man, and most often the man at work. Set a kind of labor before it and you name the worker: 农夫 nóngfū the farmer who tills the field, 渔夫 yúfū the fisherman who casts the net, 车夫 chēfū the driver who pulls or drives the cart. These read with a slightly old, plain flavor, the laboring man of an earlier age. One compound breaks the pattern in sound: 大夫, when read dàifu, means a doctor, a colloquial word for a physician. The same two characters read 大夫 dàfū once meant a senior official in the old court, so the reading you choose decides the meaning entirely.

When the man's labor becomes the thing itself, 夫 names skill and the effort that buys it. 功夫 gōngfu is the famous word: the mastery won by long practice, hence kung fu in the martial sense, but also any hard-earned competence. Written 工夫 gōngfu it leans toward the time and trouble that go into a task: 花工夫 to put time and care into something. Apart from these everyday senses sits the wholly separate literary reading fú: a classical particle with no concrete meaning, used to open a measured sentence ("now, as for") or to point quietly like "this, that," the hallmark of essay-style classical prose.

Hold one picture at the center of 夫: a grown man standing tall (大) with a hairpin run across his topknot, the cap of adulthood. That single image of the come-of-age man is the seed of every sense.

Marry the man and he is a husband: 丈夫 husband, 夫妻 and 夫妇 the couple, 夫人 the lady of the house. Send him to work and he is the laboring man: 农夫 farmer, 渔夫 fisherman, and, in a special reading, 大夫 dàifu the doctor. Let his labor harden into mastery and he becomes the skill itself: 功夫 the craft won by practice, 工夫 the time it costs. And when the same glyph is read fú, the man steps off the stage entirely, leaving behind an empty literary particle that only opens a measured classical sentence. Whenever you meet 夫, ask first which reading is in play, fū the man or fú the particle, and then which of the man's many roles the compound has in mind.