年 | nián

In Mandarin Chinese, 年 (Pinyin: nián 🔊) is a generic term for a “year” as well as other related things such as “age”, “period of life”, “period of history”, “harvest” and “New Year”. Some compound words of 年 include

• 大 + 年 = 大年 (dànián): another word for “Spring Festival” (Chinese New Year)
• 千 + 年 = 千年 (qiānnián): thousand years; millennium
• 中 + 年 = 中年 (zhōngnián 🔊): middle age; middle-aged
• 新 + 年 = 新年 (xīnnián 🔊): New Year

According to Wiktionary,

In the oracle bone script and early bronze inscriptions, it was originally 秂, an ideogrammic compound and phono-semantic compound: semantic 禾 (“wheat; grain”) + phonetic 人 (“person”) — a person carrying wheat on his back — harvest.

(I am pretty sure it was rice, not wheat.)

In bronze inscriptions after the Western Zhou period, a stroke was often added to 人 to give 千 , which still acted as a phonetic component, and this form was inherited by later scripts. The current form is simplified from 秊.

More photos related to harvest, New Year and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

万 | wàn

In Mandarin Chinese, 万 (Pinyin: wàn 🔊) is a word for “ten thousand”. It is often used figuratively, in a sense “numerous”, “countless”, “very”, “extremely”, “absolutely”, “all”, “eternity” etc. 万水千山 (wàn shuǐ qiān shān), “ten thousand rivers, a thousand mountains” is a popular idiom for the long journey.

万 is a simplified form of the traditional hanzi 萬 which originally meant “scorpion”. There is a great variety of historical forms of this latter character. However, 万 and 萬 are not similar at all. According to Wiktionary, 万 is

a simplification of the Buddhist symbol 卍 introduced when Buddhism came to China. 卍 was given the same pronunciation as 萬 meaning 萬德 (many virtues); so, 卍 came to be used as a simplified form of 萬. 万 is simply a scribal form (script) of 卍. The meaning ten thousand for 万 is a borrowing.

The modern character 万 does look more like a combination of Latin letters T and J than a left-handed swastika. Incidentally, “T.J.” is a nickname for Tijuana 🔊 — can you hear wàn there?

More photos related to numbers and sea glass @ Shutterstock.