fà 发 is bound — it almost never stands alone. You'll meet it inside hair-related compounds: 头发 (hair), 理发 (haircut), 白发 (gray hair), 假发 (wig), 长发 (long hair), 短发 (short hair). In 头发 the second syllable softens to neutral tone in everyday speech.
memory
Remember the tone by the trad form: 髮 (hair) has the 髟 "long-hair" radical on top — a person's flowing hair drawn down the side. The fà reading sits in the hair half of the merged glyph; everything else (send / issue / get rich) is fā.
Components
ideograph
发fà
hair (cursive contraction of 髮)
The fà reading is the merged simplified form of traditional 髮 (10 strokes), which carries the 髟 long-hair radical over a 犮 phonetic. In 1956 the reform collapsed 髮 (hair) and 發 (send out) into the same 5-stroke silhouette 发 — no transparent component structure survives in the hair reading either, so the whole glyph functions as a single fused residue.
Filed under radical 又 (yòu, #29) by convention. 又 is not a separate component in 发, so no strokes are highlighted.
