绯闻
fēi wén · HSK 7
sex scandal
🔴📰 scarlet + news — the kind of story that turns faces red
绯 means scarlet (silk radical + 非 fēi as sound). 闻 means news (ear 耳 inside a door 门). Put together: red-hot news, a juicy scandal.
闻 — gate 門 (phonetic) + ear 耳
Originally a pictograph of a person cupping a hand to the ear to listen, later restructured as a semantic-phonetic compound: 耳 (ear) gives the meaning and 門 (gate) supplies the sound. The core sense 'to hear' extended to 'news' and 'to smell', since both involve perceiving something from a distance.