Textile-trade term, mostly bound. You'll meet it inside compounds like 呢子 'woolen suit-weight cloth', 呢绒 'worsted woolens', 花呢 'patterned tweed', and 礼服呢 'tuxedo broadcloth'. As a standalone noun it's rare in everyday speech.
memory
Same character, two lives. Toneless ne lives at the end of sentences; rising ní lives in the tailor's shop. If a wool coat or suit fabric is on the table, read it ní.
Left mouth radical. Indexing radical inherited from the particle reading and unchanged for the fabric sense; here it carries no semantic load — the wool-fabric meaning rides entirely on the phonetic side.
Right phonetic 尼 gives the full reading directly: ní, same tone as the standalone phonetic. The fabric sense preserves this original rising tone; the particle sense weakens it to toneless ne.
