世代
せだい · sedai · JLPT N1 · noun
coevals
🌳 世 = world, 代 = era: a generation is one era of the world
世 also means generation or society, and 代 means age or substitution. Together they name people born and living in the same span of time, as in 世代交代, generational change.
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.