U+5403 "吃" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+5403 "吃" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character meaning "to eat," and it is one of the most common and essential characters in the Chinese writing system. It belongs to the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) unified ideographs block, used across these languages with similar meanings and often similar pronunciations. The character is composed of the radical "口" (mouth) on the left, indicating the action involves the mouth, and the phonetic component "乞" on the right, which provides a clue to its pronunciation. In modern usage, "吃" appears in everyday contexts such as eating food, taking medicine, or even metaphorically in phrases like "吃苦" (to endure hardship). Its simplicity and frequency make it a fundamental part of vocabulary learning for students of Chinese.