Old / former

旧 means old, used, or former; the noun decides which. In Chinese, 旧衣服 can mean old or used clothes, while 旧友 describes a longtime friend, not necessarily an older person. Japanese also uses 旧 in compounds for former arrangements and earlier systems.

The full word decides whether the tone is neutral or critical. 旧式 means old-style and can be dismissive, but 旧 does not label everything obsolete; read the whole compound before judging the writer's intent.

Why does 旧 appear as 舊?

旧 and 舊 are related written forms of the same character. 旧 is used in simplified Chinese and modern Japanese standard writing; 舊 is used in traditional Chinese and older Japanese writing. They have separate Unicode characters, so changing a font alone does not convert one form into the other. Japanese calls the modern form shinjitai (“new form”) and the older form kyūjitai (“old form”).

Older forms of 舊 appear in oracle-bone inscriptions—writing carved on animal bones and turtle shells—as well as bronze inscriptions and Chu manuscripts. One traditional etymological account connects its ancestor to an owl sign, then says the graph was borrowed for a similar-sounding word meaning “old.” That account concerns 舊's ancestry; the shape of 旧 is not a picture of an old object.

Japan's postwar reforms in 1946–1949 set the standard for the new forms. Those dates concern spelling standardization, not when the character or its meaning began.