The general feigned a retreat to lure the enemy deep in.
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佯 is a formal/literary word. In everyday spoken Chinese, people use 假装 (jiǎzhuāng — to pretend) instead. 佯 appears often in classical texts, historical dramas, and formal writing.
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佯 = 人 (person) + 羊 (sheep). Think of a wolf in sheep's clothing — a person acting like a sheep, pretending to be something they're not.
Left side-form person radical — the indexing radical. Marks 佯 as a human behaviour: pretending, putting on an act, feigning. Anchors it in the human-verb family with 假 (false), 仿 (imitate), 伪 (counterfeit), 似 (resemble). Pretence is something only people do.
Right side 羊 supplies the sound directly (yáng → yáng, exact match). Same phonetic anchors 洋 (ocean), 杨 (poplar), 痒 (itch), 养 (raise). The 'sheep' meaning is unused; the connection is purely the sound. The most famous compound is 佯装 (to pretend) and the idiom 佯死 (to play dead).
