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 埋 is a phono-semantic compound character, formed during the Shuowen Jiezi era (c. 100 AD) in China. Its structure consists of two primary components: the left radical 土 (tsuchi or do), meaning "earth" or "soil," and the right component 里 (ri or sato), which primarily functions as a phonetic element to suggest the pronunciation. In Old Chinese, 里 was pronounced similarly to the word for "burying," providing the sound, while 土 explicitly provided the meaning of earth, thus creating the character for "to bury" or "inter." Historically, the character's development is not pictographic but entirely logographic and analytic. It evolved from the small seal script (小篆) form standardized in the Qin dynasty into the clerical script (隷書) and eventually the regular script (楷書) used today. The form has remained remarkably consistent, with the primary evolution being the stylization of its strokes. The core concept has always been the act of placing an object in the earth, as directly indicated by the "earth" radical. The character 埋, 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. It arrived via Buddhist scriptures, Chinese classical texts, and official documents. The Japanese adopted the character's meaning, its Old Chinese-based pronunciation (on'yomi), which is "mai," and assigned a native Japanese word (kun'yomi) to it, "u-meru" or "u-mareru." A notable linguistic nuance is the character's relationship to its synonym 葬 (hōmurasu, "to bury a corpse"). While 葬 carries a specific funerary connotation, 埋 is more general, used for burying objects, treasures, or even in metaphorical senses like "burying" one's feelings. This reflects how the Japanese language meticulously categorized concepts imported from Chinese, applying them to fit their own cultural and linguistic framework.