Strictly when being used as a suffix for illness, sickness, disease, etc… Are they used for different things? Do they convey different nuances? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
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I’d recommend looking these up on Jisho, seeing what you get, and abstracting from there. Put an asterisk before each word (like *病 or *症) to see words that end in these kanji
After looking into it more, it looks like 病 is used when the cause is well understood/is the focus, while 症 is used elsewhere, i.e. that the symptom itself is the focus (source)
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Thank you very much @snow-pine! I was also unaware of that little asterisk trick with Jisho, thank you for teaching me that!
Aye, an asterisk is one of the two wildcard searches in Jisho - it represents a space where any number of characters can go. The other wildcard search is ?, which represents a single character.
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I think also 病 tends to relate to more body system or organ-specific diseases, whereas 症 is more symptom related, if that makes sense. So insomnia is more of a symptom, whereas lung disease is specific to a body system.
Edit: I just realised that @snow-pine has already said pretty much what I said but more succinctly!
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