Origin

Silk is made of thread, so this character uses the thread radical on the left to show it's about fabric. The component on the right is a sound hint that helps indicate how to pronounce the character — it doesn't describe silk itself, but tells you roughly how to say the word. By combining the thread classifier with this pronunciation guide, the character came to mean silk, one of the most important textiles in East Asia.

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