About
The character "杪" is structured with the radical "木" representing wood or tree, combined with "少" which historically functioned as both a phonetic element and a semantic hint toward smallness or fineness, originally referring specifically to the thin tip of a tree branch. This concrete meaning later broadened to denote any extreme end or point, and subsequently extended into temporal realms where it came to indicate the conclusion of a period, such as the end of a year or season in classical literary contexts.
Etymology Hide
