Money was tight that year — we counted every coin.
Tips
usage
The jū reading of 据 survives in exactly one compound: 拮据 (financially strapped). Outside that word, 据 is always jù.
history
The jū reading is the older literary one, first attested in the Classic of Poetry (诗经) where 拮据 described a mother bird's hands toiling to build her nest. The sense narrowed from 'hard-pressed in labor' to 'hard-pressed for money,' but the archaic first-tone reading stayed locked to this one word.
Left hand radical, indexing component (variant of 手). Marks 据 as a hand-action character: gripping, occupying, seizing — hence the abstract sense 'to rely on, to base oneself on.' Same radical anchors 抓 (grab), 持 (hold), 拿 (take).
Right-side 居 supplies the sound — jū shifts to jù with a tone change. A faint semantic echo helps too: what one resides in is what one occupies. This is a simplification artifact: the traditional form 據 used 豦 as the phonetic, which the reform swapped for the easier-to-write 居.
