～艘
～そう · ～sou · JLPT N2 · noun
ship
🚢 艘 = 舟 boat + 叟 (sō, old man): the boat radical plus a sound part read sō
The left part 舟 means boat and marks the meaning. The right part 叟 is pronounced sō and gives the reading. Use it for ships and boats: 一艘 (issō) is one ship and 三艘 (sansō) is three ships.
艘 — boat radical 舟 + sōu phonetic 叟
A phono-semantic compound: 舟 (boat) gives the meaning, while 叟 (an old man) supplies the sound sāo/sōu. Originally written to denote a large vessel, 艘 became the standard measure word for counting ships and boats in Chinese.