About
袂 is a phono-semantic compound: the clothing radical 衤 on the left suggests the category of clothing, and the element 夬 on the right gives the reading "mèi". The character was created to name the sleeve of a traditional Chinese garment, the tubular portion that covers the arm. It served as the ordinary word for sleeve throughout classical literature, but in contemporary spoken Chinese it has been entirely replaced by 袖 (xiù). Now 袂 appears only in formal literary writing, accounts of historical dress, and set poetic phrases about parting or joining hands.
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