晚餐
wǎncān · HSK 2
supper
🍽️🌙 晚 = late/evening + 餐 = meal; the late meal of the day
晚 (wǎn) means late or evening, and 餐 (cān) means a meal or food. Together 晚餐 literally reads as evening-meal, the standard Mandarin word for dinner or supper.
晚 — sun 日 + 免 (avoid/phonetic)
晚 combines 日 (sun) as the meaning component with 免 as the phonetic. The sun element signals a time of day, while 免 hints at the pronunciation wǎn. Originally it referred to the late part of the day when the sun is setting, and from there extended to mean 'late' in a general sense.
餐 — 歺 (bone fragment) + 又 (hand) + 食 (food)
Originally a phono-semantic compound showing a hand (又) taking food from bones (歺), with 食 (food) as the meaning component. The top portion 'cǎn' provides the sound, while 食 indicates the meaning of eating. Over time it came to mean 'meal' or 'to eat.'