Two readings with very different meanings: sào = 'embarrassed / to shame' (害臊 'feel bashful', 臊得慌 'so embarrassed'); sāo = 'rank, urine-smelling' (腥臊 'fishy and rank'). Mostly heard in northern colloquial speech.
memory
肉 (flesh) + 喿 (chirping/noisy) — the rank smell of meat going off. The 'embarrassment' sense developed metaphorically from a 'tainted/exposed' feeling.
⺼ is the meat-flesh radical, visually identical to 月 but tracing back to a slab-of-meat shape. It tags 臊 as a smell-of-meat word — the strong rank odor of mutton, fish, or unwashed flesh — alongside 腥 (fishy) and 膻 (gamey).
喿 supplies the reading, drifting from zào to sào along the old sibilant pair. The same phonetic surfaces in 燥 (dry), 操 (handle), and 噪 (noisy), all clustered around the sao and zao syllables.
