0054 欠

欠

This character means ‘lack, miss, be lacking; owe (in Chinese but not Japanese)’ and is pronounced KETSU or kaku in Japanese, qiàn in Chinese.

It shows a man out of breath, exhausted, trying to get his wind back, which is a little more obvious in the original character:

.

Those three diagonal strokes look like the character that now means ‘hair,’

彡,

but Wieger says that here (and in some other characters) they are synonymous with

气,

which means ‘steam, vapor, air.’

So, if you can’t catch your breath, you are seriously lacking.