Origin

The left component, a shrine symbol, marks this character as relating to religious or spiritual matters. The right component, 止, serves as a sound hint — it tells you the character is pronounced something like "shi," not that it means "stop." Over time, the shrine-related spiritual sense broadened to encompass blessings and good fortune that come from proper ritual and worship, eventually generalizing to mean welfare and happiness more broadly.

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