About
The character "蛏", representing a razor clam, stems from its traditional form "蟶", a phono-semantic compound combining the "虫" radical to categorize it as a creature and the component "聖" to suggest its pronunciation. In the simplified form, the phonetic element is altered to "圣". The character's meaning has remained exclusively associated with this specific shellfish, and its structural rationale as a semantic-phonetic construct persists despite the graphical modification.