About
The character 茼 is a phono-semantic compound formed from the grass radical 艹 (cǎo) above, indicating a plant, and the phonetic 同 (tóng) below. It almost exclusively denotes the garland chrysanthemum, an edible plant, and appears most often in the compound 茼蒿 (tónghāo). This illustrates the systematic construction of botanical names by combining a general plant classifier with a distinct phonetic to identify species. Its meaning has remained within culinary and agricultural use, never developing extended metaphorical senses.
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