About
The character "萘" is a modern phono-semantic construction devised for the scientific term naphthalene, incorporating the grass radical "艹" as a semantic indicator for organic compounds and the character "奈" as a phonetic component to approximate the sound "nài". Its etymology is directly linked to the adoption of Western chemical terminology in the 19th century, and it has consistently referred to this specific hydrocarbon without semantic shift since its creation, lacking any prior usage in classical Chinese texts.