Literomancy, from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

''litero'', "letter", ''mancy'', "divination", is a form of

fortune-telling Fortune telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. Melton, J. Gordon. (2008). ''The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena''. Visible Ink Press. pp. 115-116. The scope of fortune telling is in principle identical wi ...

based on written words, or, in the case of Chinese,

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

. A fortune-teller of this type is known as a literomancer. When practicing literomancy, the client puts up a ''subject'', be it a single character or a name. The literomancer then analyzes the subject, the client's choice of subject or other information related to the subject, along with other information he sees in the client or that the client supplies to arrive at a divination. Some literomancers can read the curves and lines of a signature as signed by an individual, just as a professional handwriting analyst might, but uses instinct and divination techniques rather than applied analysis skills. As a superstition, literomancy is practised in Chinese-speaking communities and known as ''cèzì'' (). The subjects of a literomancy are traditionally single characters and the requestor's name (Chinese believe that the name can affect one's destiny). In modern times, elements such as foreign words or even more recently,

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

addresses and

instant message Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

handles have come into use as a subject.

External links

An example of fortune-telling with a Chinese name

looks like an ad--> Superstitions Divination Chinese language Chinese culture {{occult-stub