Example sentences
wǒ我ài爱nǐ你。
I love you.
tā他ài爱tā他de的jiā家rén人。
He loves his family.
The story behind the character
爱
Stare at 爱 for a second and you'll notice something's missing. The traditional 愛 has a heart (心) right in the middle, and the simplified version scraped it out. That's where the old joke comes from: modern Chinese love is heartless. Colder fact: even the traditional 愛 didn't originally mean love. Xu Shen's dictionary gives it four words. 愛, 行貌也: "the look of walking." A character that now means love once meant strolling around. People borrowed it for affection two thousand years ago and never gave it back.