The radical of "Liu" is "Zhi".
Liu, a first level Chinese character, is pronounced li ú or li ǔ, which was first seen in oracle bone inscriptions. The original meaning is "kill", which later extended to "axe and tomahawk" weapons. Shuowenjiezi was probably lost because it avoided the taboo of the Han Emperor Liu's family name, but there were some words with "Liu" as the side character and the word "鐂" was not seen in the historical biography. Xu Kai deduced that the traditional "Liu" was mistaken for "鐂" because the inflexible "Dao" (鐂) was mistaken for "Tian", and the Chinese character reference books generally used Xu Kai's words (such as Kangxi Dictionary).
As for the origin of the word "Liu", except that some people think that "Mao" is the original word of "Liu" and "Liu" is the origin of "Mao" plus "Fu" (Dao) and "Jin" (meaning symbol), there are two main views.
First, the variant character "鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂37. The word "Liu" in the seal characters is "Jin" on the left (surface material), and the right is composed of "Mao" on the upper part (surface part) and "Dao" on the lower part. Or, the word "Dao" is changed to "Tian" and it is "鐂". The word "戼戼 (Mao)" in the two writing methods means to kill animals in the oracle bone inscriptions, so the original meaning of the word "Liu" is "kill".
Second, the word "Liu" was originally a pictographic character, and later developed into a combination of ideographic and phonographic characters. On the left side of the word "Liu" in the oracle bone inscriptions is a pictogram of an animal in the shape of a big bird, as well as an artistic person; On the right is a pictogram of a knife, meaning "stabbing animals or people with a knife", which intuitively expresses the original meaning of the word "Liu" - killing. At the stage of inscriptions on bronze, the formation of the character "Liu" has changed greatly from the original pictographic character to the ideographic and phonographic character; The right part below is "hand", which means "holding with hand". The combination of the three means "killing with weapons in hand", which is the original meaning of the word "Liu". There are two ways to write the word "Liu" in the Xiaozhuan stage. The first kind of writing "鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂鐂; The second kind of traditional writing, "Liu", is derived from the golden inscription of the word "Liu", but has also changed - into a left and right structure: on the left is the combination of the upper "Mao" and the lower "Jin"; The word "hand" on the right has been replaced by "Dao", which has become the meaning of Congmao, Congjin and Congdao. The word "Liu" in official script and regular script continued to evolve on the basis of the second structure: "Dao" was changed to "Fu"
