The character 鞭 (biān), meaning "whip," is a phono-semantic compound formed by combining the semantic radical 革 (gé, "leather") on the left, which indicates the material a traditional whip was made from, with the phonetic component 便 (biàn) on the right, which provides an approximate clue to its pronunciation. The full word 鞭子 adds the suffix 子 (zi), a common nominalizer in Mandarin, to create the concrete, everyday noun for "whip." Thus, the character's structure logically integrates meaning (leather) and sound (biàn) to represent the object, while the added suffix completes its standard lexical form.