Definitions
old variant of 鶴|鹤[hè]
Etymology
About
鸖 is an archaic variant form of the well-known character 鶴, which means 'crane', a bird that in Chinese culture is a symbol of longevity. The character flips the usual orthographic layout: the semantic element 鳥 (bird) stands on the left instead of the customary right, while the phonetic element 隺 (originally a pictograph of a bird soaring high, indicating the pronunciation 'hè') occupies the right side. Such structural inversions were a common practice in creating variant characters before orthographic standardization fixed the bird radical on the right side of this avian character, 鶴, the crane.
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