How I Misspelled a Chinese Word

I was reading a book about the Chinese Character Language.

One word mentioned was the word for 'scholar' which looked like the English 'Plus-Minus' sign.
The book said that the word was made up of two characters the 'one' and the word 'ten'
and the word meant 'one-in-ten'. A month later reading another book it described the word
as knight. I asked my wife who is Chinese what the word meant and I coped the word onto
a piece of paper. Imaging my surprise when she said "earth', neither one of the words I expected.
I said I thought it meant either "knight" or scholar but she said I had made the bottom one
character too long.
An interesting fact is the similarity of the character and Roman character for one, two, three and ten.
Chinese:

Roman

Please send questions or comments to James Downer

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