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荇 is a phono-semantic compound for the fringed water lily (Nymphoides peltata). The top component, 艹, is a radical meaning vegetation, while the bottom, 行, is phonetic. This structure gives the character a stable botanical sense; it appears in classical poetry and botanical texts to denote these floating plants of shallow lakes and ponds. The pairing of a generic plant classifier with a precise phonetic marker anchors its meaning to this particular species, preventing semantic drift.
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