About
蝮 is a phono-semantic compound combining the semantic radical 虫 (broadly denoting insects, reptiles, and crawling creatures) with the phonetic component 复. It originally referred to a specific venomous snake, the pit viper or adder, historically dreaded for its lethal bite. The character appears mainly in biological taxonomy and literary portrayals of dangerous serpents, rarely branching into extended metaphors, though historical texts occasionally use it to describe a malicious or treacherous person, comparing them to a venomous snake.
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