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The character 莠 (yǒu) is a phono-semantic compound. The top radical 艹 (cǎo), meaning grass, provides the semantic category of a plant. The lower component 秀 (xiù), meaning elegant or beautiful, serves as the phonetic element. This creates a contrast between the positive sound component and the character's negative meaning. 莠 originally referred to green foxtail grass, a weed that grows among crops and harms harvests. This led to its common metaphorical use for bad or harmful people mixed with good ones, as in the idiom 良莠不齐 (liángyǒu bùqí, "good and bad are intermingled").
Etymology Hide
