About
The character 蚍 is a phono-semantic compound, with the insect radical 虫 on the left providing its semantic category of bugs and small invertebrates, and the component 比 on the right supplying its pronunciation. This structure is typical for biological terms in Chinese, where a broad category is specified by a phonetic attachment. 蚍 is most commonly seen in the binomial 蚍蜉, which denotes a type of large ant.
Etymology Hide
