CJK Unified Ideograph-9516

It names a mineral's colored oxidation film in Chinese. The Mandarin reading is qiāng. Dictionaries use it in 锖色 for the many-colored film that forms on a mineral's surface through oxidation. For ordinary Chinese metal rust, use 锈 or 鏽 instead.

Japanese changes the answer. Japanese writes metal rust as 錆, read さび (sabi), and 錆びる means "to rust"; the verb also extends to an ability going dull. The page's 锖 is the simplified counterpart of 錆, but the two forms are not interchangeable in a Japanese sentence.

The graph is a phono-semantic build: 金 marks the metal field and 青 supplies the sound. That is why it labels a material effect without picturing rust.

how did 锖 get these different meanings?

Its dictionary history predates the meanings most readers reach for. No single inventor is documented. The earliest evidence supported here is the 997 Longkan Shoujian, a Buddhist dictionary for reading scriptures; its 錆 entry is glossed as a hook's name. That attests the graph, not today's mineral-color compound or Japanese rust spelling.

Japanese rust first appears here as a word, not this graph: the late-8th-century Man'yoshu records the sound with phonetic characters, and a poem around 1005 is cited for sabi meaning rust. A separate, same-sounding sabi became a medieval Japanese aesthetic of weathered materials, solitude, and age in tea, gardens, and poetry; that line is usually tied to 寂.