About
鹇 designates the silver pheasant, a large, ornate bird from the mountains of East and Southeast Asia. It is a phono-semantic compound, combining the semantic radical 鸟 (niǎo, bird) with the phonetic component 闲 (xián). Its traditional form is 鷴, using the radical 鳥 and the element 閑. This bird held significant cultural value, appearing in classical poetry and art, and was used as an official rank badge for Ming and Qing dynasty civil officials to denote a specific bureaucratic level.
Etymology Hide