About
The character 纥 is a phono-semantic compound with the semantic radical 纟 (sī), meaning silk or thread, on the left, and the phonetic component 乞 (qǐ) on the right. Its traditional form, 紇, uses the full silk radical 糸. Originally, it referred to coarse silk, thread ends, or a type of knot. In modern usage, it most commonly appears as a phonetic component in transliterated names of ethnic groups, such as the Huihe (回纥), an ancient Turkic people ancestral to the modern Uyghurs.