材

• Concrete: Timber or lumber; wood specifically as a resource or building material.
• General/Technical: Raw material, substance, constituent matter, or ingredient.
• Human Capacity: Innate talent, endowment, or natural aptitude (the inherent quality of a person rather than acquired skill).

Contrast with 才: 材 typically denotes potentiality (raw capacity), whereas 才 more frequently denotes actualized ability or brilliance.

In early layers of the language, the distinction between 材 and 才 can be porous; they may appear as orthographic variants regardless of the specific sense intended.