年 - Dong Chinese dictionary

nián

year

Pictograph of a person (人) harvesting grain (禾). The harvest season is a yearly event.

Components

禾 Iconic component

hé

grain stalk

Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 禾 than it was in ancient scripts.

人 Iconic component

rén

person

Due to historical stylistic changes, this component is less similar to 人 than it was in ancient scripts.

Evolution

Oracle script

(~1250-1000 BC)

Bronze script

Early Western Zhou (~1000 BC)

Seal script

Shuowen (~100 AD)

Clerical script

Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD)

Regular script

Modern

Definitions

年

nián

year; new-years; person's age; CL:個|个[gè]

年

Nián

surname Nian

年 (秊)

nián

grain; harvest (old); variant of 年[nián]

Most common words with 年

Freq.	Word	Meaning
	年	grain
	今年	this year
	年轻	young
	去年	last year
	年代	age

Historical pronunciation

Old Chinese	Middle Chinese	Pinyin	Gloss
*C.nˤi[ŋ]	nen	nián	harvest; year

Statistics

HSK level 1

Appears in 96.9246% of movies

154th most common character in movies

45th most common character in books

Miscellaneous

Strokes	6
Unicode	U+5E74
Shuowen	“年，穀孰也。从禾，千聲。”

Sources

MTSU Chinese text computing

漢語多功能字庫

季旭昇《說文新證》p.574-575

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Freq.

Word

Meaning