刷る
する · suru · JLPT N3 · verb-godan
to print
🖨️ 刷 = 巾 cloth + 刂 knife: carve the block, rub it with cloth to print
Old woodblock printing meant cutting a block, inking it, then rubbing paper over it with a pad. 刷 also means brush, as in 刷毛 (hake). It sounds exactly like する, to do, so a press just does the same page again and again.
刷 — 刂 knife + 㕞 (brush, phonetic)
A semantic-phonetic compound. The right side 㕞 originally depicted a brush or scrubber and supplies the sound, while the knife radical 刂 hints at scraping or sweeping action. The character came to mean 'to brush, scrub, or swipe,' later extending to modern senses like swiping a card or binge-watching.