年

Oracle bone script (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén): depicts 禾 (grain) carried by 人 (person) → symbolizing a harvest, thus marking the completion of a yearly cycle.

Bronze inscriptions (金文 jinwen): shows variants with additional dots or strokes within 人.

Seal script (小篆): 人 transformed into 千 with a long horizontal stroke; this led Xu Shen (허신) in 《설문해자》 to misinterpret it as a phono-semantic compound (禾 “grain” + 千 “phonetic”).

True origin: pictographic compound representing “a person carrying grain,” i.e., the harvest cycle that defines a year.

Semantic range:

- year, annual cycle;

- age (years of life);

- by extension: era, time period.

연도 (年度) — year, annual term

생년 (生年) — year of birth

학년 (學年) — school year, grade

연령 (年齡) — age

연말 (年末) — year-end

연초 (年初) — beginning of the year

연중 (年中) — throughout the year

신년 (新年) — New Year

秊 (U+79CA), which preserves the early seal script form.