Examples of phono-semantic characters include "river", "lake", "stream", "surge", "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes (氵), which is a reduced form of the character 水 shuǐ meaning "water", indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator- for instance: has a very similar pronunciation to and has a similar (though somewhat different) pronunciation to 河. For example, in the case of (Old Chinese ) "surge", the phonetic indicator is (Old Chinese ), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; the effect of historical sound change means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.
