About
The character 殁 combines the death radical 歹 with a right-hand component that descends from 沒's unextended meaning "to sink, to disappear". In its traditional form 歿, the right side was 𠬛, a variant of 沒 without the water radical, which supplied both sound and this sense of vanishing. The simplification replaced 𠬛 with the unrelated weapon radical 殳, a purely visual streamlining. 殁 is a formal, literary term for dying, used in obituaries and historical writing, and rarely appears in everyday speech.
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