癌
yán · HSK 7
cancerous
🦀 疒 disease + 品 three mouths + 山 mountain — it grows and grows
Three mouths (品) stacked on a mountain (山), wrapped in the sickness radical (疒). Cells multiplying and piling up — the character itself sprawls like the disease it names.
癌 — sickness radical 疒 + 嵒 (rocks/cliff)
癌 combines the sickness radical 疒 with 嵒, which depicts piled rocks or a rocky cliff. The rocks suggest hard, lumpy growths, fitting the meaning 'cancer' (hard tumors). It is a relatively modern coinage, adopted in the 19th–20th century to translate the Western medical concept.