The active, bright, asserting half of a pair that needs both. Yang is not greater than yin; neither exists alone.
Chinese 陽 (yáng), literally "sunshine" or "the sunlit side of a hill"; paired from antiquity with 陰 (yīn), the shaded side, to name a cosmology of complementary opposites — light and dark, active and receptive — in which neither term names a thing that exists alone.
Assertion and brightness, named as half of a pair rather than as a whole thing on its own — the other half is not optional. Neither side outranks the other; a pairing like this only exists as a pairing.