Literary — almost never appears alone in modern Chinese. Lives in the fixed pair 翌日 (yìrì, 'the next day') and 翌年 (yìnián, 'the next year'), both common in news, novels, and historical texts. Modern colloquial equivalents: 第二天 / 第二年.
memory
羽 ('feather') below 立 ('to stand') — the original meaning was 'next day' (when feathers spread / sun rises again). Same root as 翼 (yì, 'wing').
Top 羽 — the feather radical, drawn as two paired plumes. The indexing element. Originally 翌 wrote 'the next day' through the image of a bird taking flight at dawn — wings spread as the sun rises. The feathers above carry that daybreak-flight metaphor, anchoring 翌 with 翔 (soar), 翅 (wing), 翼 (wing).
Bottom 立 supplies the sound — lì drifting to yì through the well-attested l/y alternation seen in 翼 and across this small phonetic group. 立 pictures a person standing firm on the ground (大 above 一); for 翌 it functions purely as a sound-marker carrying the reading without contributing to meaning.
