Origin

This character combines a person marker on the left with a sound component on the right that hints at the pronunciation "ボク". The right side, which also originally meant something like a tree or plant, serves only to indicate how the character should be pronounced in Chinese. The left side, a simplified person figure, indicates the character relates to a person or human role. Over time, the meaning shifted from referring to a servant or subordinate to become a casual first-person pronoun used mainly by males and boys, though the servant sense is preserved in the native Japanese reading.