About
喱 is a modern phono-semantic compound formed by pairing the mouth radical 口 with the phonetic component 厘. The radical 口, often associated with eating or speech, here lends a sense of "meal", while 厘, a unit meaning "one thousandth", gives the literal breakdown "a thousandth of a meal". However, this character has no historical semantic role; it was created purely for transcribing foreign sounds. It appears most often in culinary loanwords, such as 咖喱 (curry) and 啫喱 (jelly), reflecting the script's ongoing adaptation to new vocabulary.
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