About
The Chinese character 廑 is a phono-semantic compound made up of the semantic radical 广, which depicts a house on a cliff or a wide shelter, and the phonetic component 堇, which supplies the pronunciation and originally denoted yellow loam or clay. In its earliest use, the character meant a small house or a modest hut, mirroring the architectural sense of the radical. Over time, the character came to signify 'careful, diligent,' and it can function as an adverb meaning 'barely' or 'only just.' This adverbial sense is etymologically and phonetically linked to the closely related character 僅.
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