About
The character 鹆 is a phono-semantic compound used in ornithological terms. Its right component, the bird radical 鸟, classifies it semantically as a type of bird. The left component 谷, meaning valley, serves only as a phonetic element, indicating the pronunciation "yù" without contributing its own meaning. In traditional form, it is written as 鵒, with the unsimplified bird radical 鳥. This character appears almost exclusively in the compound 鸲鹆 (qúyù), the formal name for the crested mynah, a bird known for mimicking human speech, also commonly called 八哥 (bāgē).
Etymology Hide
