The oracle bone form of 来 (traditional: 來) is a pictograph of a wheat plant: a central stalk with grain-bearing branches sweeping outward and downward to either side, roots visible below. The Shuōwén Jiězì (说文解字) records this explicitly — 來 originally meant wheat (小麦 xiǎomài), the grain that "came" to China from the West along early trade routes. The connection between the grain and the direction is not metaphor: wheat was a foreign arrival, and the character that pictured it was repurposed to name the concept of arriving.

At some point before the bronze inscription period, 来 had already made this shift from wheat-plant to arrival-verb. The original meaning of wheat migrated to the compound 小麦, and 来 became one of the most fundamental directional words in the language. The radical assignment (木 — wood, tree) reflects the visual form, not the meaning: the character looks like a plant, so it was placed under the tree radical in later classification systems.

In classical Chinese, 来 carries a strong speaker-centered orientation: it means "toward here" — toward the speaker's position. This holds in Mandarin today. 来 is the inbound direction; 去 qù is the outbound. When someone calls out 来！it means "come here!" When someone says 你来了 (You came / You've arrived), the speaker is the reference point that the other person has moved toward. The grammar of 来 is the grammar of arrival: things move to where the speaker is.

当 来 functions as an origin marker, it answers the question "from where did this arrive?" 来自 (to come from; to originate from) is the standard way to state origin in formal and written contexts. 他来自上海 (He is from Shanghai) — the person arrived at the present situation from Shanghai. 这个词来自拉丁语 (This word comes from Latin) — the word made its way here from Latin.

This use of 来 to trace origin threads through several common compounds: 来源 láiyuán (source; origin — "the place from which it comes"), 由来 yóulái (origin; background — "by what path it came"), 原来 yuánlái (originally; as it turns out — "what it came from originally"). All carry the spatial logic of 来: something traveled here from somewhere, and these words name that "somewhere."

A wheat plant. Grain sweeping outward in both directions from a central stalk, roots below. Before this character meant "to come," it meant the grain that had come — traveled from the West along ancient trade routes to reach the Central Plains. The grain was a foreigner, an arrival, and the character that pictured it became the word for arriving.

Every 来 compound is an arrival. 来了 (it has arrived). 回来 (come back — return to the reference point). 来自 (arriving from — origin as approach). 从来 (arriving all the way from the beginning of time up to now). 将来 (what is about to arrive — the future). 未来 (what has not yet arrived). Even 来不及 — "the time cannot arrive fast enough" — is about arrival falling short.

Chinese grammar requires you to decide, with every motion verb, whether the movement is toward the speaker (来) or away from the speaker (去). There is no neutral movement. Every journey is narrated from a position: here or there, inbound or outbound. 来 is the inbound half — the wheat arriving from the West, the spring arriving from the future, the friend arriving at your door. The oracle bone still in the character.