读者
dúzhě · HSK 3
reader
📖 读 = read + 者 = -er/person; reader = read-person
者 is the agent suffix in Chinese, turning a verb into the doer (作者 author, 记者 reporter, 学者 scholar). So 读者 literally stacks read + person to mean one who reads — a reader or subscriber.
读 — speech radical 讠 + 卖 (mài, sell)
读 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The left side 讠 (speech) gives the meaning, since reading is tied to speaking words aloud. The right side 卖 originally provided the sound; in the traditional form 讀 the phonetic was 賣 (yù/dú).
者 — old/elder 耂 + say 曰
Originally depicted sugarcane or a similar plant, but the form was reanalyzed as 耂 (old) over 曰 (say). It became a grammatical suffix meaning 'one who…' or 'the…thing,' nominalizing verbs and adjectives. Today 者 mainly marks agents or categories, as in 学者 'scholar' or 记者 'reporter.'