The ancients spoke of drinking the night mist as a way to nourish life.
Tips
usage
Used in 沆瀣 (night vapor) and especially the idiom 沆瀣一气 — to be hand in glove with someone for bad purposes, like two patches of foul mist merging into one.
Left 氵 is the water radical 水 in left-side form. It marks 瀣 as water in the air — night mist or vapor.
phonetic
瀣xiè
phonetic residue
The bulky right side is the sound element, giving the reading xiè, but it has no clean standalone form to point to. This rare literary character survives almost only in the fixed pair 沆瀣, so learners treat the whole graph as one unit rather than parsing it stroke by stroke.
