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瓠 (hù) designates the bottle gourd or calabash, a large, hard-shelled vine historically cultivated for food and for hollowing into containers. It combines 夸 (kuā) on the left and the melon/gourd radical 瓜 (guā) on the right. 瓜 signals the semantic category of vine-grown fruit, while 夸 (meaning 'boast' or 'exaggerate') also implies largeness or sprawling growth, providing both a phonetic cue and a secondary sense of the gourd's substantial size. This character appears in agricultural treatises and in literary metaphors concerning vessels and buoyancy, reflecting the practical utility of dried hollowed fruits in ancient domestic life.
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