About
The character 犸, alongside its traditional form 獁, is a modern phono-semantic compound created for transliteration. It combines the animal radical 犭 on the left, classifying it as a beast, with the phonetic component 马 (simplified) or 馬 (traditional) on the right. This character was constructed in recent times to approximate the second syllable of "mammoth" and visually mark it as an animal. It exists solely within the noun "猛犸" for the extinct prehistoric elephant, with no independent meaning or historical usage outside this specific scientific loanword.