午餐
wǔcān · HSK 2
lunch
🍱 午 = noon + 餐 = meal → noon-meal = lunch
午 marks midday (the noon hour, as in 中午), and 餐 means a meal or to dine. Stack them: midday + meal = lunch. Compare 早餐 breakfast and 晚餐 dinner — same 餐, different time-of-day prefix.
餐 — 歺 (bone fragment) + 又 (hand) + 食 (food)
Originally a phono-semantic compound showing a hand (又) taking food from bones (歺), with 食 (food) as the meaning component. The top portion 'cǎn' provides the sound, while 食 indicates the meaning of eating. Over time it came to mean 'meal' or 'to eat.'