About
The character "鹋", whose traditional form is "鶓", is a semantic-phonetic compound constructed from the radical "鸟" (or "鳥" in traditional form) meaning "bird" and the component "苗" which primarily indicates pronunciation. This character was coined to denote the emu, a large flightless bird from Australia, entering Chinese vocabulary through transliteration of its foreign name. The meaning of "鹋" has been consistently tied to the emu since its creation, with no recorded shifts in semantic use, and its structural composition remains unchanged between its simplified and traditional variants.