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Etymology data from Wiktionary via Wiktextract (CC BY-SA 4.0). Chinese character data from the 說文解字, the Taiwan MOE 國語辭典簡編本 (CC BY-ND 3.0 TW) and HSK/TOCFL lists.

Explanations are written by a local model (gemma4) and only published after a verification pass against the cited sources. How it works.

Chinese

累

lèi
to pile up; to heap up; to mount up; to accumulate
  • HSK 1
  • TOCFL 2
  • radical 糸
  • 11 strokes

Etymology graph

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Origin

Simplified from 纍 (畾 → 田).

Folk etymology considers this character as an ideographic compound representing the tiredness after work. In ancient China, men were working in the field (田) while women sewed (糸).

Various semantic fields can be distinguished:

; “to add; to accumulate”

; “to damage; exhausted; tired”

; “to bind; to wind around”

From Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Lineage

  • simplified fromChinese纍 “to stitch, link or bind together in an orderly fashion”
    • soundChinese畾 “soil margin between croplands”
    • meaningChinese糸 “thin silk”
  • partChinese田 “farmland (Classifier: 塊／块 m c)”
  • partChinese絲 “silk (fibre, cloth, fabrics, etc.)”

Meanings

character
  1. to pile up; to heap up; to mount up; to accumulate
  2. repeated; numerous; unremitting; continuous; persistent
  3. to repeat; to replicate; to overlap
  4. to add (to); to increase; to grow
  5. to amount (to); to sum up (to)
  6. a surname

國語辭典 definitions

  1. 操勞過度。 例：勞累、疲累
  2. 牽涉、牽連。 例：拖累、連累、受累
  3. 虧損。 例：虧累
  4. 負擔。 例：家累

© Ministry of Education, Taiwan — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW, shown unaltered.

How 累 was written 字形演變

  1. 累 in Small seal script
    Small seal
    說文小篆
    Shuowen, c. 100 CE
  2. 累 in Regular script
    Regular
    楷書
    since c. 200 CE

Historical forms collected by the legacy etymfun dataset; most characters have several attested variants.

Sources

  • Structural decomposition (chaizi) — See upstream
  • Historical glyph forms (zdic.net 字形演变) — Rights unverified
  • HSK / TOCFL word lists — Facts (levels)
  • 教育部《國語辭典簡編本》 (Taiwan MOE) — CC BY-ND 3.0 TW
  • Wiktionary (via Wiktextract / kaikki.org) — CC BY-SA 4.0
  • Wiktionary: 累