The Wheat That Came From the Heavens

A stalk of wheat stands with its ear in the center, two leaves pointing upward, and a stem and roots reaching downward. This image forms the basis of the character 來. In its earliest pictographic form, the character depicted the plant, sometimes including an extra horizontal line at the top to emphasize the ear of the wheat. It is a pictogram of wheat, related to the character 麥.

While the character originally represented a grain, it has been borrowed to mean "to come," "to arrive," or "to happen" since the oracle bone script. During the Western Zhou and Warring States periods, writers sometimes added components like 止 (foot) or 辵 (to walk) to distinguish the borrowed sense of movement from the original sense of the plant. These additions were not carried into later scripts. Some suggest that the character 麥 may have originally meant "to come" before the meanings interchanged through frequent use.

The Shuowen dictionary offers a mythological connection between the grain and the action, stating that wheat is "that which comes from the heavens." This idea is supported by archaeological evidence suggesting wheat is not native to China but originated in the Fertile Crescent. In modern usage, the character can mean arriving from another place, continuing from a specific time until now, or referring to the future.

Linguistically, 來 was inherited from the Proto-Sino-Tibetan *la-j ~ ra. It is a cognate of the Burmese လာ (la, "to come"). In Old Chinese, both 來 and 麥 are reconstructed to begin with *mr-, though 來 retains the liquid as /l/ and 麥 retains the nasal /m/.

Explore the full etymology graph of 來 on etymfun.com.

Based on Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the sources listed on etymfun.com; written by a local model and fact-checked statement by statement against them. Illustration generated locally.