Definitions
heir-requesting sacrifice
Etymology
About
禖 refers to an ancient sacrificial rite performed to seek a child or heir. It is a phono-semantic compound: the left component 示 (spirit/altar), a radical common in ritual and religious characters, provides the semantic category, and the right component 某 (mǒu) supplies the sound. The structure thus combines a general marker of sacrifice with a phonetic to denote this specific fertility ceremony.
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