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The character 篥 is formed with the bamboo radical 竹 on top, a conventional marker for items crafted from bamboo or for woodwind instruments. Beneath it lies the phonetic component 栗, meaning chestnut, which gives the pronunciation without overriding the semantic category set by the radical. In practice, 篥 almost never occurs on its own; it functions as the second character in the compound 觱篥, the name of a traditional double-reed woodwind instrument that originated in Central Asia. As such, the entire meaning of 篥 is tied to this historical bamboo instrument.
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