Explore each form from the oldest known stage to today.
The character 且 originally depicted a sacrificial altar or ritual stand in ancient oracle bone script. Over time, its meaning evolved to represent 'moreover,' 'and,' 'also,' or 'temporarily' in classical Chinese. The character's form simplified from a more elaborate altar shape to the current blocky structure, though some ancient variants show additional horizontal lines representing stacked ritual objects. This evolution from concrete ritual object to abstract grammatical particle reflects how Chinese characters often transformed from pictorial representations to functional linguistic symbols. Arrived in Japan: The character 且 arrived in Japan during the Yayoi period (approximately 300 BCE-300 CE) through cultural exchange with China, likely as part of the broader introduction of Chinese writing systems that occurred before the Nara period. It was incorporated into the Japanese writing system as a kanji character, used both in compound words and as a grammatical element in classical Japanese texts.