Sake-warming character

It names sake served warm, or the act of warming it.

The earliest cited Japanese example appears in a 15th-century etiquette text, where water is heated for hand-washing. A sake-history account infers that warmed sake was already being drunk in the Heian period. By the Edo period, iron sake-warming pots called 燗鍋 and water-bath warming had developed; placing the sake pot in hot water made its temperature easier to control than direct heat.

Chinese dictionaries connect 燗 with 爛 and 爤, characters associated with food cooked until done. Japanese dictionaries chiefly apply 燗 to sake, though some extend it to shōchū, a distilled Japanese drink, or Chinese liquor.

What does 燗 signal in a message?

Read it as Japanese sake vocabulary unless the surrounding language says otherwise.

Japanese compounds carry the detail: 燗酒 names sake served warm, 燗する means to warm sake, and 燗冷まし is sake that has cooled after warming.

Chinese-language dictionaries record a Mandarin reading written làn in pinyin, roughly “lahn” with a falling tone. A Chinese-language message may use that reading rather than the Japanese sake vocabulary.