Origin

This character represents the idea of moving or walking slowly and deliberately. The left component, which looks like a vertical line with two small branches, indicates walking or movement. The right component serves as a sound hint for pronunciation, showing roughly how the character should be read aloud in Chinese-derived contexts. Together, the combination of the walking radical with this sound indicator created a character meaning to move or proceed gradually, which later came to mean "slowly" or "gently" in general.