The word 太極 comes from I Ching: "易有太極，是生兩儀，兩儀生四象，四象生八卦，八卦定吉凶，吉凶生大業。" .
Common English translations of the cosmological Taiji are the "Supreme Ultimate" (Le Blanc 1985, Zhang and Ryden 2002) or "Great Ultimate" (Chen 1989, Robinet 2008); but other versions are the "Supreme Pole" (Needham and Ronan 1978), "Great Absolute", or "Supreme Polarity" (Adler 1999).