風邪
かぜ · kaze · JLPT N5 · noun
cold
🤧 風邪 = wind + evil: a cold is an evil wind that gets into you
Old Chinese medicine blamed illness on a harmful wind entering the body. 風 is wind and 邪 is evil or harmful. Kaze is also the word for wind (風), so a cold and the wind sound identical in Japanese.
邪 — 牙 (tooth/phonetic) + 阝 (right ear, 邑 city radical)
邪 is a phonosemantic compound. The right-side 阝 (from 邑, 'settlement') originally referred to a place name, while 牙 supplied the sound. Over time the place-name use faded and the character was borrowed for the abstract sense 'crooked, evil, heterodox,' which is now its main meaning.