The word 年龄 (niánlíng), meaning "age", is formed through the direct and logical combination of two meaning-based characters. The first character, 年, originally a pictograph of a person carrying a harvested crop, represents the concept of a "year" as an annual cycle. The second character, 龄, is itself a compound containing the "tooth" radical (齿), which in classical Chinese thought symbolized the stages of life (as teeth grow and change), combined with the component 令 which primarily provides phonetic suggestion. Therefore, the compound 年龄 essentially fuses the idea of counted "years" (年) with the inherent concept of "life stage" (龄) to form the complete notion of a person's age.