茶碗
ちゃわん · chawan · JLPT N5 · noun
bowl
🍚🥣 茶碗 = tea + bowl: a tea bowl that ended up holding rice
茶 (cha) is tea and 碗 (wan) is bowl. The word first named bowls for drinking tea, then widened to everyday ceramic bowls, and now most often means the one you eat rice from. Cha + wan: tea-bowl, used for rice.
茶 — grass radical 艹 + 余 (phonetic)
茶 combines the grass radical 艹, indicating a plant, with 余 serving as the phonetic component. It originally derived from the older character 荼, which referred broadly to bitter herbs; a stroke was dropped during the Tang dynasty to distinguish the tea plant specifically. Today it means tea.
碗 — stone radical 石 + 宛 (wǎn, phonetic)
碗 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The 石 radical originally indicated stone or hard material, reflecting that early bowls were made of stone or pottery; later it came to cover ceramic and porcelain bowls too. The component 宛 supplies the pronunciation wǎn.