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犍 denotes a castrated bull (bullock), often used as a strong draft animal in traditional agriculture. It is a phono-semantic compound: the bovine radical 牛 on the left marks the semantic field of cattle, while the right side 建 (jiàn) supplies the pronunciation. Beyond its zoological meaning, the character also appears in names of ancient administrative districts and places, illustrating how specialized agricultural terms occasionally became proper nouns in classical texts.
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