How Chinese Characters Evolved
A Chinese character has not always looked the way it does now. Looking up its etymology means following two stories at once: the story of its meaning, and the story of its shape. This tool shows the second. Enter a character below and you will see its attested forms, as they were carved into bone and shell thirty-three centuries ago, cast in Zhou bronze, brushed on the silk and bamboo of the Warring States, then settled by the Han clerks — each one dated and traced to the collection it is recorded in.
Radical 耒 — plough
What this run of images shows, no text says as quickly: the oldest characters are drawings. 魚 is a fish standing on its tail, fins and all; 門 is a double-leaf gate; 火 is a flame. There are only a handful of them — the vast majority of Chinese characters are compounds, one part for the meaning and one for the sound — but they are the parts everything else is built from, and finding them again lights up the rest. What stiffened the drawing into strokes was the hand of the clerks: they wrote fast, with a brush, on bamboo slips. After them, a character no longer looks like the thing it stands for.
Under each form, two short lines of Chinese: the period of the document, then the collection the form is recorded in. They are left as palaeographers write them — 商 for the Shang, 西周早期 for the early Western Zhou, 戰國.楚 for the state of Chu under the Warring States — because that is the exact string you need to find the piece again in the catalogues. The plain date, at the head of each script, says the same thing for readers of English.
Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), public domain (CC0).