喝 = 口 + 曷. The left side is 口 (kǒu), an open mouth, drawn since the oracle bones as a simple gaping square. The right side is 曷 (hé), which carries no meaning here; it lends only its sound. This is the classic pictophonetic build of the 口 family: a semantic mouth on the left, a phonetic cue on the right, the whole character pointing at something that happens at the lips.

The phonetic 曷 is itself a busy little glyph, 日 (sun) over 匃 (to beg), and in older texts it worked as an interrogative, roughly "why, when, how". None of that survives in 喝. What carries over is the rime: 曷 hé and 喝 hē sit in the same phonetic series, so the right half tells a literate reader how the character sounds long before it tells them anything about water or wine.

The 口 radical does the semantic work, and it does it generously across the whole script. Put a mouth beside a phonetic and you get an act performed by the mouth: 吃 (chī) to eat, 吹 (chuī) to blow, 唱 (chàng) to sing, 喊 (hǎn) to yell. 喝 belongs to this crowd twice over. Read hē it is the mouth taking liquid in; read hè it is the mouth pushing sound out, a shout or a stern cry. Both readings are the same picture from opposite directions: the open mouth as gateway.

The 喝 (hè) shout reading is the older literary one and shows up in phrases like 大喝一声 (dà hè yī shēng), to bellow once. Everyday modern Mandarin overwhelmingly uses the hē reading for drinking; the hè reading survives mainly in fixed expressions and narrative prose. Japanese borrowed the same graph as 喝 (katsu), the sharp Zen shout a master barks to jolt a student awake, preserving exactly the "cry out" sense.

Picture a wide-open mouth at a teahouse table, the 口 on the left of the character literally drawn as that opening. To its right stands 曷, a friend leaning in asking "why, when, how", the old questioning word, but here he says nothing meaningful; he is only there to whisper the sound hē into your ear. The mouth is doing all the work, the question-mark friend is just the pronunciation tag.

Now run the same mouth in both directions. Tip it back and liquid pours in: 喝水, 喝茶, 喝酒, all the way to 喝醉 when the wine wins. Open it the other way and sound rushes out: 大喝一声, the bellowed hè that silences the room. One glyph, one open mouth, two flows, in for drinking and out for shouting.

To lock the everyday reading, anchor it to thirst: 渴 (kě) dries your throat, 喝 (hē) wets it. They look almost identical because both lean on 曷; only the left radical differs, water 氵 for the thirst, mouth 口 for the act that fixes it.