Several parts combine into one character.

句 is a compound ideograph: 勹 (the "wrap" radical, depicting an enclosing curve) + 口 (mouth). The composite reads as "words from the mouth wrapped into a discrete unit" = a phrase, a verse, a single utterance bound together as one. The character beautifully visualizes the linguistic unit itself: speech wrapped into manageable pieces. Few characters concretize abstract grammatical concepts as elegantly.

Korean reading "gu." 句節 (gujeol, phrase / passage — used in literary analysis), 語句 (eogu, phrase / wording), 絶句 (jeolgu, "cut-off verse" = a quatrain in classical Chinese poetry — Korean students study Tang-era 절구 in classical literature classes), 名句 (myeonggu, famous saying / quotable line), 一字一句 (iljaillu, "one character one phrase" = every single word — used emphatically: "without omitting a single word"), 句點 (gujeom, period / full stop in punctuation).

Mandarin jù, 4th tone. 句 (jù), 句子 (jùzi, sentence — basic grammatical unit), 一句话 (yī jù huà, "one sentence / one statement" — used to introduce a brief comment), 名句 (míngjù, famous quotation). Importantly, 句 functions as a measure word in Mandarin for utterances and statements: 我说一句 (wǒ shuō yī jù, "let me say a sentence / a word"), 几句话 (jǐ jù huà, "a few sentences / a few words"). Mandarin counts speech in 句 units the way English counts in "sentences" or "remarks."

Japanese on-reading ク (ku) — 句 (ku, phrase / verse), 句読点 (kutōten, punctuation marks), 語句 (goku, words and phrases / wording). And critically for Japanese literary culture: 俳句 (haiku, "comic verse" → the 5-7-5 syllable poetic form). Haiku is perhaps the most globally recognized Japanese cultural export, with millions of practitioners worldwide writing haiku in dozens of languages. The character 句 specifically names the poetic unit. The first half of the haiku tradition called these verses 発句 (hokku, "starting verse"), but the master Masaoka Shiki (正岡子規, 1867-1902) reformed the term to 俳句 — the haiku we know today. 句 also appears in 川柳 (senryū, the satirical 5-7-5 cousin of haiku).

Memory aid: words from the mouth (口) wrapped into a unit (勹) — a verse, a phrase, the basic chunk of speech.