消える
きえる · kieru · JLPT N5 · verb-ichidan
to disappear
🕯️ 消 = water 氵 + 肖 (to dwindle): what dwindles away is gone
The kanji 消 pairs the water radical with 肖, a component that carries the sense of shrinking down to nothing. It is the same 消 as in 消す (kesu, to erase or put out) and 消しゴム (eraser): kesu makes a thing vanish, kieru is the thing vanishing by itself.
消 — water 氵 + 肖 (phonetic)
消 is a semantic-phonetic compound: the water radical 氵 indicates the meaning, while 肖 (xiào) supplies the sound. It originally described water dwindling or melting away, and from there extended to the modern senses of vanishing, dissolving, and dispelling.