Origin

This character combines a sound hint on the left with a meaning component on the right. The left part, the character for woman, suggests roughly how to pronounce it. The right part, a mouth or opening, carries the core idea of comparison or likeness—imagining speech or utterance used to make comparisons, like saying "it's like..." or "such as..." When you speak a comparison using your mouth, you're drawing a similarity between two things. Over time the character came to mean likeness, similarity, and the various comparison meanings that follow from that basic sense.

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