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 character "絶" is a phono-semantic compound, composed of two primary elements. The left side, the radical 糸, represents "silk" or "thread," which provides the core semantic meaning related to cutting or severing a thread. The right-side component, 色 ("color"), primarily functions as a phonetic indicator, lending its ancient pronunciation close to *tset or *dziat to the new character, while also potentially contributing a nuanced meaning of "appearance" or "form," thus completing the idea of "cutting off a form" or "severing a connection." Its earliest forms appear on bronze inscriptions from the Western Zhou Dynasty, evolving through the Warring States period scripts into the clerical script (隷書) of the Han Dynasty, which standardized the structure into the form recognizable today. The original meaning was "to cut off" or "to sever," as in physically cutting a thread. This concrete meaning was then abstracted to encompass the cessation of lineages, traditions, or existence itself, leading to the meanings "to die out," "to extinguish," and "to discontinue." "絶" arrived in Japan around the 5th century CE, imported alongside the broader Chinese writing system via the Korean Peninsula. It was adopted into the Japanese language, retaining its core meanings and undergoing the standard phonetic shifts to become pronounced as "ze-tsu" in Sino-Japanese (on'yomi) readings and "ta-tsu" or "ta-eru" in native Japanese (kun'yomi) readings. A significant linguistic note is its role in forming many compound words, such as 絶滅 (extinction), 絶望 (despair), and 拒絶 (rejection), where its fundamental concept of "severance" is consistently applied, demonstrating how a character with a concrete origin came to express profound abstract and existential concepts.