Explore each form from the oldest known stage to today.
Historical forms are not available yet. The current form is shown as a reference.
The kanji 涙 is a phono-semantic compound, formed during the Shuowen Jiezi era of Chinese character systematization. Its semantic component is the "water" radical (氵, sanzui), which classifies the character's meaning as related to a liquid. The phonetic component is 戾, which originally meant "to arrive" or "to bend" and provided the approximate pronunciation *lui in Middle Chinese. The character's core meaning has consistently been "teardrop" or "to weep," representing liquid that flows from the eyes. Historically, 涙 evolved from a more pictographic character. In earlier bronze and seal scripts, the primary character for "tear" was 泪, a straightforward ideographic compound of 氵 (water) and 目 (eye), literally "water from the eye." While 泪 is a later variant in China, it is considered a simpler, more logical formation. The character 涙, with its phonetic element, became the standard form in classical texts. This development is part of a broader trend where many early pictographic or ideographic characters were later reformed or replaced by more systematic phono-semantic compounds. The character 涙, along with the vast majority of the kanji system, was introduced to Japan in several waves, primarily from the 5th to the 8th centuries AD, through imported Chinese texts like the Confucian classics and Buddhist scriptures. It was adopted into the Japanese writing system, retaining its original meaning. A key cultural and linguistic note is that in Japan, the older, more pictographic form 泪 is also used and is considered a valid variant (it is a 常用漢字表内の異体字). This coexistence provides a direct window into the different historical layers of character formation for the same concept.