草

• Biological/Botanical: Generic grass, weeds, or wild greenery. In medical or pharmacological contexts, refers specifically to "herbs" (non-woody medicinal plants).
• Material: Dried vegetation used as straw or thatch.
• Qualitative (Later periods): Rough, unrefined, or hasty. This includes cursive script/rough drafts and behavioral carelessness or sloppiness.

• Crops vs. Wilds: Generally refers to wild or generic vegetation rather than specific cultivated cereal crops.
• Orthography: While 艸 serves as the semantic category marker (radical) for botanical terms, 草 functions as the standalone noun for the plant or material itself.

// Tang-period reading: //tsɑ̌u.

• Semantic variants: U+8278 and U+8279.

• When a text describes sleeping or building, distinguish between living grass and processed bedding/roofing material.
• Use caution applying abstract qualitative senses (rough, hasty) to early texts (Pre-Qin/Early Han), where the glyph remains almost exclusively concrete.