(literary) Hoping to settle victory and defeat in a single battle.
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history
冀 was one of the legendary Nine Provinces (九州) of pre-imperial China and survives today as the official abbreviation of 河北 on licence plates and rail codes. The literary verb sense 'to hope' (希冀，冀望) is unrelated, sharing only the graph.
Top 北 supplies a faint phonetic clue - běi drifted to jì - and anchors the meaning, since 冀 originally named 冀州, the northernmost of the nine ancient provinces. Same 北 appears in 背, 邶. Indexed under Kangxi #12 八 by tradition, taken from the splayed strokes at the bottom of 異.
semantic
異yì
different; strange
Bottom 異 (traditional form of 异) - a person lifting a mask, originally meaning 'different, strange'. In 冀 it pairs with 北 to depict the far-north province as 'the strange country up north', and from that geographic sense the verb meaning 'to hope for distant things' developed.
Filed under radical 八 (bā, #12) by convention. 八 is not a separate component in 冀, so no strokes are highlighted.
