Yángguāng cóng qiángshàng de fèngxì tòu le jìnlái.
Light seeped in through a crack in the wall.
Tips
history
Rarely used alone today, surviving in literary words like 罅隙 (a crack; a gap). Its original sense was the splitting of fired pottery, so it is built from the pottery radical 缶 plus phonetic 虖.
register
Literary only; appears in formal or classical writing, not in everyday speech.
The pottery-jar radical on the left. It anchors the original meaning — the crack that opens when fired clay splits — grouping the word with vessel characters like 缸 and 罐.
phonetic
虖hū
to exhale; phonetic
The right side supplies the sound; its old reading drifted to xià. It contains 乎 and is itself a rare graph, contributing pronunciation only.
