膜
mó · HSK 6
membrane
🎞️ mó sounds like mo-vie — and movies play on a thin film
The character 膜 combines 月 (flesh/body radical) with 莫 (mò, nothing/do not). A membrane is the body's thinnest layer — almost nothing there, just a delicate film stretching across a surface.
膜 — flesh radical 月 (肉) + 莫 (phonetic)
膜 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The flesh radical 月 (a form of 肉) signals body tissue, while 莫 supplies the sound 'mò/mó'. It originally referred to thin layers of tissue in the body, and now broadly means 'membrane' or 'film', as in 薄膜 (thin film) and 角膜 (cornea).