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孪 denotes twins or the act of giving birth to multiple children at once, built on the child radical 子 to signal offspring. In its traditional form 孿, the upper part was the phonetic 䜌, suggesting continuous or entangled threads, a metaphor for the intertwined nature of multiple births. The simplified character replaces this complex component with 亦, which not only streamlines the structure but also means "also" or "second", fittingly evoking the idea of a second child. Thus 孪 combines 亦 and 子, literally "again a child". This core twin meaning extends consistently into medical and biological terms for multiple gestation.
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