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The character 堀 is a phono-semantic compound: the left-side radical 土 'earth' ties it to soil and terrain, while the right-side 屈 (qū) provides the pronunciation 'kū'. Its meanings are a cave, a hole in the ground, or an excavated ditch, emphasizing excavation over natural openings. Though similar to other characters for cave or hole, 堀 especially highlights the act of digging. It appears often in historical texts and is widely familiar from Japanese proper nouns and surnames, where it denotes a moat or a canal dug around a fortification.
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