Definitions

zhì bag, satchel; book cover

Etymology phono-semantic

cloth

Semantic: Phonetic:

About

is a phono-semantic compound with the semantic component (clothing, fabric) on the left and the phonetic on the right. It originally referred to a cloth wrapper or covering for books, scrolls, or documents, similar to a modern book jacket or portfolio. Over time, the character became closely associated and often interchangeable with , which uses the radical (cloth or towel) instead of but shares the same phonetic and identical meaning: a cloth document wrapper or a volume of books.