About
伥 denotes a figure from traditional Chinese folklore: the ghost of a person devoured by a tiger, compelled thereafter to assist the tiger in hunting and luring new human victims. Structurally, it combines the semantic radical 亻 (human or humanoid) on the left with the phonetic component 长 on the right to indicate pronunciation. The traditional form, 倀, retains the same human radical but uses the unsimplified character 長. The chilling mythology gave rise to a powerful metaphor, and the character now appears in idioms that condemn treacherous people who actively help tyrants, criminals, or evil forces harm the innocent.
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