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The character 蠊 is a phono-semantic compound: its left radical 虫 (the "bug" radical) marks the insect category, while the right component 廉 (lián) provides the pronunciation. Although 廉 originally means "honest" or "upright", here it strictly serves a phonetic role. Historically, 蠊 appears almost exclusively in the binomial term 蜚蠊 (fěilián), the formal taxonomic name for a cockroach. The character has no simplified or traditional variants, and its structure, a semantic bug radical paired with a phonetic, has always denoted this specific insect without any shift in meaning.
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