About
垓 originally means a boundary or border of a piece of land. It is a phono-semantic compound combining the semantic radical 土 (earth) on the left and the phonetic component 亥 (hài) on the right. The character is historically famous from the place name Gaixia (垓下), the site of a decisive ancient battle. Beyond its geographic sense, it was later adopted into Chinese numeration to denote an extremely large number: one hundred million times one hundred million (10^8 or 10^16, depending on the era's mathematical conventions).
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