About
猹 refers to a badger-like wild mammal that forages in farmland. A phono-semantic compound, it uses the animal radical 犭 on the left to mark it as a wild beast, while the right component 查 provides its pronunciation. This character was created by the author Lu Xun to transcribe a rural colloquial name for the animal, which had no written form. Its history is therefore rooted in early twentieth-century literature, and its usage remains largely confined to discussions of those works and the agricultural pests they describe.
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