灾难
zāinàn · HSK 5
catastrophe
🌊 灾难 = disaster + difficulty
灾 (zāi) means disaster or calamity — originally fire under a roof. 难 (nán) means difficulty or hardship. Together: a hardship-level disaster, i.e. catastrophe or tragedy.
灾 — roof 宀 + fire 火
灾 is an associative compound showing fire (火) under a roof (宀), depicting a house on fire — the original meaning of 'disaster' or 'calamity'. An older variant 災 added 巛 (flooding water) above 火, combining flood and fire as twin disasters. The modern simplified form keeps just the house-fire image.
难 — 又 (right hand) + 隹 (short-tailed bird)
Originally written with 堇 (clay) plus 隹 (bird), 難 depicted a rare bird and was borrowed to mean 'difficult.' The modern simplified form replaces the left side with 又 (hand). The phonetic role of the original left component gave the reading nán.