腰掛ける
こしかける · koshikakeru · JLPT N2 · verb-ichidan
to sit (down)
🪑 腰 (waist/hip) + 掛ける (hang on): hang your hips onto a seat = sit down
腰掛け is the noun for a stool or bench. 腰掛ける literally means to hang the waist on something, which is exactly what sitting down does.
腰 — flesh radical 月 (肉) + 要 yào (phonetic)
A semantic-phonetic compound. The 月 (flesh) radical signals a body part, while 要 supplies the sound 'yāo'. Notably, 要 itself originally depicted a person with hands on the waist, so it once meant 'waist'; when 要 shifted to mean 'want/important', 腰 was created with the flesh radical to preserve the original sense.