一代
yī dài · HSK 6
generation
👴👶 yī dài = one + era — a single era of people is a generation
一 means one, 代 means era or period. One complete era of a family line gives you a generation. The dài sound echoes 'die' — each generation lives and dies to make way for the next.
一 — single horizontal stroke
一 is one of the simplest pictographs in Chinese, depicting a single horizontal line to represent the number one. It has retained essentially the same form since oracle bone script over 3,000 years ago. By extension it also means 'first,' 'whole,' or 'same.'
代 — person radical 亻 + 弋 (stake/dart, phonetic)
代 is a semantic-phonetic compound: 亻 (person) gives the meaning and 弋 supplies the sound. The original sense was one person taking the place of another, which broadened to 'substitute,' 'replace,' and then 'generation' or 'era' — successive groups of people replacing the previous.