Origin

This character combines the soil radical 土 on the left, which marks it as something earth-related, with a sound component on the right that hints at its Chinese pronunciation. The right side 冢 was originally used in Chinese to write words related to burial mounds and tombs, so over time the combination came to mean a small hill or hillock — essentially a raised mound of earth. The soil radical clarifies that we're talking about something made of earth rather than just any raised shape, while the right component both suggests the pronunciation and carries echoes of the mound meaning.