无辜
wú gū · HSK 7
innocent
🐑 无 = without + 辜 = guilt, so 无辜 = having no guilt = innocent
辜 carries the sense of crime or guilt; prefix it with 无 (without) and you get the legal sense of not guilty. wú gū also rhymes internally, an easy two-beat hook for not-at-fault.
无 — top 一 + 林-like middle + fire radical 灬 below
Originally a pictograph of a person dancing while holding ornaments or tassels, meaning 'to dance' — the ancestor of 舞. It was borrowed phonetically to write the negative 'not have / without,' and the dance meaning was reassigned to 舞 with an added foot element. The simplified form 无 comes from an ancient variant.