The waves gnaw at the coastal rocks day and night.
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啮 is a classical or literary character rarely used in everyday modern Chinese. It appears in compound words like 啮齿动物 (rodent, literally 'gnaw-tooth animal') and 侵啮 (to erode or encroach). In daily speech, 咬 is used instead for 'to bite'.
Left mouth radical - pictograph of an open mouth. Indexes 啮 in the eating family with 吃 to eat, 咬 to bite, 嚼 to chew. 啮 specifically means to gnaw or nibble - the grinding bite of a rodent on something hard - so the mouth radical names the body part doing the work.
Right side 齿 - simplified picture of teeth set in a mouth. Provides the semantic content rather than the sound: 啮 = mouth + teeth, doubling down on the biting action. The phonetic 齿 does NOT match niè; this is a true compound ideograph where both pieces carry meaning and the sound is opaque.
