胡

A phono-semantic compound combining:

肉 (고기 육) — “flesh,” representing the body, and providing the semantic field of human or physical traits.

古 (옛 고) — “ancient,” serving as the phonetic element.

The composition suggests “a person of flesh” marked as other or foreign by phonetic association.

Uniquely, in this character the 月 (a variant of 肉) appears on the right-hand side, unlike almost all other characters where the flesh radical stays on the left — making 胡 a rare structural exception.

The full, original form is 鬍, which more explicitly means “beard.”

Later, the simplified form 胡 came to represent both “foreigner” and “beard.”

호인 (胡人) — a foreigner; historically Central Asian or northern nomad

호언 (胡言) — absurd talk; nonsense (“reckless words”)

호위 (胡爲) — “why?” (classical interrogative form)

호수 (鬍鬚) — beard, moustache

호씨 (胡氏) — the Ho family name

In Korean, 되놈(胡奴) was a native equivalent for “barbarian,” derived from this hanja.

In ancient China, 胡 designated various northern and western nomadic tribes such as the Xiongnu (匈奴) and later Turkic or Central Asian peoples.

Thus, 胡 was not a specific ethnicity but a broad exonym for “non-Chinese” frontier groups.

Over time, this sense evolved from ethnic differentiation to cultural foreignness, as seen in words like 胡琴 (“foreign fiddle”) and 胡麻 (“sesame”).

In this way, 胡 came to mean foreign-origin, not strictly “barbarian.”

In Korean and Japanese usage, it sometimes preserved older connotations of “foreign” or “wild,” but later became neutral in surnames like Ho (胡).