About
The character 炔 is a phono-semantic compound, with the fire radical 火 on the left providing its semantic category and the component 夬 on the right supplying its pronunciation. Although it once carried obscure meanings related to fire or smoke, it is now used almost exclusively in chemistry. The character was assigned the pronunciation quē to denote an alkyne, an unsaturated hydrocarbon with at least one carbon-carbon triple bond. The fire radical reflects the combustibility of such compounds, while the phonetic element was selected to systematically translate Western chemical terms into Chinese.
Etymology Hide
