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幂 is a phono-semantic compound: 巾 ('cloth') gives the meaning, while 冖 ('cover') provides the sound and also suggests covering. Its original sense was a cloth cover draped over ritual or everyday vessels to protect them from dust. This physical meaning persisted in classical literature. When Western mathematics was translated into Chinese, 幂 was adopted to mean exponentiation (mathematical power), the metaphor being that an exponent 'covers' the base number just as a cloth covers an object. As a result, the character now carries both a concrete sense of a covering and a mathematical one.
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