信仰
しんこう · shinkou · JLPT N3 · noun
religion
🙏 信仰 = trust (信) + look up to (仰)
信 means trust or believe, and 仰 means to look upward or revere. Faith is literally trusting in something you look up to. The reading shinkou pairs shin (as in 信じる, to believe) with kou.
信 — person 亻 + speech 言
信 combines 亻(person) with 言(speech), depicting a person standing by their words. The original sense is 'truthfulness' or 'sincerity'—what a person says can be trusted. From this it extended to 'believe,' 'trust,' and later 'message' or 'letter,' since a letter carries one's word.
仰 — person radical 亻 + 卬 (phonetic)
仰 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The 亻 (person) radical gives the meaning, while 卬 supplies the sound; 卬 itself originally depicted one person standing and another kneeling looking up, so it also reinforces the sense. The character means to look up, and by extension to admire or rely on.