meaning '' the written characters'' in contex

I have almost no Chinese so depend on web search. Nevertheless from my naive viewpoint, here is some of what I find.

First here is one character representation or translation for death:

and here is the character representation or translation for clock:

On comparing these characters you will see that the left hand half of each there is a similarity. It may be even stronger depending on the precise way the characters are written. This presumably has lead to the association of clocks with death. I hope an expert on Chinese calligraphy and characters will be able to do this better than I have been able to do.