襾

襾 originated as a pictograph of a cover, drawn as a lid or a cloth draped over a receptacle to depict covering from above. It serves both as an independent character meaning "to cover" and as a radical. As a semantic component, it appears in characters related to covering, hiding, or enclosing, most often at the top, as in 覃 and 覆. Over time, its use as a standalone verb was supplanted by phono-semantic compounds, and in modern Chinese it functions almost exclusively as a structural indexing radical in traditional dictionaries.