About
The character 驽 (nú), whose traditional form is 駑, is a phono-semantic compound: 马 (simplified from 馬, 'horse') serves as the semantic radical at the bottom, and 奴 (nú, 'slave') is the phonetic component at the top. Originally, it denoted an old, exhausted, sluggish, or otherwise inferior horse, lacking the speed, strength, and stamina needed for military or transport use. Deriving from this literal sense, the character was used metaphorically to describe people, commonly as a self-deprecating term for one's intellectual limitations, or to characterize someone as untalented or slow-witted despite persistent effort.
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