About
The character 箕 is a phono-semantic compound, with the bamboo radical 竹 on top indicating the material of the object, and the phonetic component 其 below providing its pronunciation. It primarily refers to a winnowing basket, a traditional, flat, open-ended agricultural tool woven from bamboo strips, used to separate chaff from grain by tossing the mixture into the air. Beyond this practical use, the character was also adopted in traditional Chinese astronomy as the name for the Winnowing Basket, one of the Twenty-Eight Mansions within the Azure Dragon constellation group.
Etymology Hide
