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刍 is the simplified form of 芻, which was originally a pictograph of a hand picking off blades of grass. It means hay, fodder, or freshly cut grass for feeding livestock. In classical texts, the character also served as a humble first-person pronoun or as a term for a person of low status, particularly one who gathered firewood or cut grass. The simplification reduces the traditional character, which symmetrically depicted bundles of grass, to an abstract shape that retains the agricultural meaning but obscures the original image of hand-harvesting.
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