Origin

This character combines the wood radical on the left, which suggests something made of or related to wood, with a sound component on the right that hints at the pronunciation. The character originally referred to unfinished or unadorned wood — the kind you might use raw from a tree before shaping it into something refined. That sense of raw, unshaped wood naturally extended to mean crude, simple, or plain in general. Over time it came to describe plain, straightforward qualities in people and things.

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