The word 暮霭, meaning "evening mist", is formed by combining the character 暮, denoting "dusk", which itself is a phono-semantic compound with 日 (sun) as a semantic component added to 莫 for phonetic and original meaning, and the character 霭, meaning "mist", a phono-semantic compound with 雨 (rain) as the semantic radical and 谒 as the phonetic component; their meanings merge to describe mist occurring at dusk.