职权
zhí quán · HSK 7
authority
🎖️ 职权 = 职 (official post/duty) + 权 (power/right): the power that comes with your job
职 is your post or duty; 权 is power or rights. Stack them and you get the authority a position grants over others — not personal clout, but power attached to the office itself.
权 — wood 木 + 雚 (heron, phonetic)
Originally a phono-semantic compound: 木 (tree/wood) gives the meaning, while 雚 supplies the sound 'quan'. The early sense referred to a specific tree, then shifted to mean a weight used on a steelyard balance. From 'weight' it extended metaphorically to 'authority' and 'power', the dominant modern meaning.