About
The character 艉 is a specialized nautical term for the stern or rear section of a ship. It is a phono-semantic compound: the left component 舟, the 'boat' radical, establishes the semantic field of watercraft and navigation. The right component 尾 (wěi, 'tail') functions both as the phonetic indicator, determining the pronunciation, and as a semantic clue, since the stern of a vessel is akin to a tail. The combination of boat and tail thus directly conveys the idea of a ship's back end.
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