歲

• Harvest/Grain: The actual crop or the event of the harvest (closely related to 穀).
• Year: A solar or natural year, reflecting the annual agricultural cycle.
• Age/Lifespan: A tally of years lived.

• Noun: The harvest; a year.
• Measure Word (Classifier): Used for counting age or duration of time.
• Temporal Adverbial: Meaning "annually" or "every year."

Contrast with 年: While often interchangeable, 歲 tends toward the biological, agricultural, or experiential (e.g., as the primary term for counting age), whereas 年 often refers to the calendar year, a general period of time, or an era.

• Semantic variants: U+4E97, U+5C81, U+5D57, U+6B73, U+21ED5.
• Simplified variant: 岁 (U+5C81).

In early scripts, variants that emphasize the grain components may signal a stronger lean toward "harvest" or "crop," though many such variants are simply scribal habits.

• Point vs. Span: Because of its root in the harvest, 歲 can occasionally refer to a specific point in the year (the autumn/harvest season) rather than the full twelve-month duration.
• Contextual Pivot: When meaning is ambiguous, determine if the text is concerned with the passage of time (year/age) or the yield of the land (harvest).