Tuesday, September 23, 2014

0006 冬



This is fuyu, meaning 'winter.' The two lower marks are an alteration of




which means 'ice' or 'water,' and which is itself an 'abbreviation' of




which means 'ice.'


The other part of the character—




—is not used in any other character in Japanese (as far as I can tell), but it comes from an old character representing a thread skein, fastened by a pin, which signals 'the end' and 'fixation.' The notion is that winter is the 'frozen end of the year,' i.e., ice plus the end of of the skein.

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