Almost never used alone - appears in fixed compounds: 讣告 (obituary notice), 讣闻 (death announcement). The 讠 (speech) radical signals 'announcement'; the 卜 (divine) phonetic is now read fù.
讠 is the left-side form of 言 (speech). It marks 讣 as an act of formal announcement - specifically the spoken or written notice issued by a family when a death occurs. Groups with 讨 (denounce), 讯 (interrogate), 讲 (lecture).
卜 provides the sound, shifted to fù. There is also a faint semantic echo: divination and obituary notice both belong to ritual communication with the unseen. Same phonetic in 补 (mend) and 朴 (simple).
