The original meaning of this character is to mow grass.
Tips
history
An ancient character. The original sense was mowing grass with shears; from "cutting things into order" it came to mean governing well, as in the classical phrase 乂安 (peace and good order).
Components
ideograph
乂yì
to govern; mow
Just two crossing strokes, originally a picture of shears or crossed blades cutting grass. The modern form is an abstract X-shape that no longer recognisably depicts the tool, so it stands as a single indivisible graph.
Filed under radical 丿 (piě, #4) by convention. 丿 is not a separate component in 乂, so no strokes are highlighted.
