臾

yú

人 + 臼

Definitions

yú surname Yu

yú a moment; little while

Etymology

About

臾 originally combined elements suggesting hands engaged in pulling or dragging, though the modern character has simplified and obscured these early pictographic features. In contemporary usage, it is almost exclusively a bound morpheme found in the compound 须臾, which means a very brief moment, an instant, or a fleeting point in time. Because it no longer functions independently as a noun or verb, its etymological link to physical action has been entirely overshadowed by this temporal sense. The character now appears mainly in classical and formal literary expressions, where it adds rhetorical weight to descriptions of time's rapid passage or the ephemeral nature of events.