拾う
ひろう · hirou · JLPT N4 · verb-godan
to pick up
🪙 hirou sounds like hero: the hero picks up what others dropped
拾 = hand radical 扌 + 合 (to join): a hand joining with an object, i.e. picking it up. The reading hirou is close to hero, and a hero stops to pick up litter or a lost coin and finds its owner.
拾 — hand radical 扌 + 合 (combine)
A semantic-phonetic compound: 扌 (hand) gives the meaning of picking up, while 合 (hé, to join) supplies the phonetic, shifted to shí. Originally meant to gather or pick up with the hand. The reading shè is used in formal contexts and as a numeral variant of 十 (ten) on financial documents.