About
The character 虘 is a phono-semantic compound that pairs the tiger radical 虍 (top and left), indicating a feline or wild beast, with the phonetic component 且 (lower right, nested beneath the tiger radical) to give the reading cuó. It was created to convey the specific auditory and behavioral notion of a tiger's roaring or aggressive actions. While this zoological sense was its primary meaning, 虘 also appears in historical texts as a proper noun. This illustrates a common phenomenon: characters coined for very narrow animal traits were sometimes borrowed for their sound to write names, after which they often fell out of active use in the modern language.
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