Definitions
a mouth or opening
Etymology
About
The character 谽 denotes a deep, empty, wide-open valley or ravine. It is a phono-semantic compound: the left side, radical 谷 (valley), gives the semantic category of gorges and depressions, while the right side, 含 (contain, hold), indicates the pronunciation. The character appears almost exclusively in literary and poetic contexts, often in compounds that vividly depict a vast, empty, or imposing gap in the mountains. Its core meaning of geographical hollowness has stayed constant in classical poetry and geographical descriptions.
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