About
莠 (yǒu) is a phono-semantic compound combining the grass radical 艹 (cǎo) as the meaning component, indicating a plant, and 秀 (xiù) as the phonetic component. The positive connotation of 秀 ('elegant') creates a striking contrast with the character's pejorative sense. The original meaning is green foxtail, a pernicious weed that aggressively invades farmland and harms crop yields. This extended to a metaphorical sense of bad or useless people intermingled with the good, as reflected in the idiom 良莠不齐 (liángyǒu bùqí), 'good and bad mixed together'.
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