The character 椅子 (yǐzi, meaning "chair") is formed through a combination of semantic and phonetic components. The left part, 木 (mù), is the semantic radical meaning "wood", indicating the material from which traditional chairs were made. The right part, 奇 (qí), primarily serves as a phonetic component to suggest the pronunciation, though its original meaning of "strange" or "uneven" is unrelated. This phono-semantic structure is common in Chinese script. Historically, the character 椅 originally referred to a type of tree before its meaning shifted to the furniture item, and the suffix 子 (zi) is a common nominalizer added to form the everyday spoken word.