Han character 遏

遏 means “stop, block, or suppress”; modern Chinese usually uses it in formal compounds such as 遏制 and 遏止. An early use in the Shijing, an old Chinese poetry collection, calls for stopping predatory violence; later dictionaries also record “reach” and “harm” in classical phrases. The Shuowen, an early Chinese character dictionary, links 遏’s movement component 辵 with its sound component 曷.