Origin

This character combines the mouth radical on the left, which flags that the character relates to something you do with your mouth, with the sound component on the right that provides a pronunciation hint. The right side comes from a character meaning "contract" or "agreement," but here it's just helping indicate how to say the word—roughly "kitsu." Together, the mouth indicator paired with this sound hint creates a character for consuming things by mouth, whether eating, drinking, or smoking.

AI-generated (claude-haiku-4-5), not yet reviewed. Formation type (automated guess): Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint).