流

• Physical Flow: The movement of liquid, including steady flow and dissipation. In contexts involving wealth, health, or vital essence, it often denotes leakage, drainage, or wasting away.
• Social Displacement: When applied to people, indicates drifting, vagrancy, or specifically exile and banishment.
• Intellectual Tendency: A "current" of ideas, denoting a general tendency, prevailing influence, or a formal school of thought/classification.

• Verb:

// //Intransitive:* To flow, to drift, to be exiled.

// //Transitive:* To spread, to circulate, or to allow something to leak/drain.

• Noun: A physical stream or current; an abstract school or style.
• Adjective: Floating, unstable, or lacking a fixed root.

• vs. 移 (shift): While 移 generally implies a deliberate move from one location to another, 流 emphasizes the passivity of the subject—being carried by a current or forced out by external pressure.
• vs. 漂 (float/drift): While both involve water, 流 focuses on momentum and direction, whereas 漂 emphasizes the state of floating on the surface.

Fanqie reading: 力求; Tang-period reading: *liou.

The phonetic component suggests an original sense of "outward emergence," informing a consistent theme of movement away from a center or source.

• In legal or historical texts, prioritize "exiled" over "traveling" when the glyph refers to displaced people.
• In very early texts, treat intellectual tendencies as "trends" rather than rigid categories.