As a character (not a radical), has risen to new importance, and even notoriety due to the 20th-century Chinese writing reform. In
simplified Chinese, takes the place of a number of other characters with the phonetic value
gān or
gàn, e.g. of "dry" or "trunk, body", so that may today take a wide variety of meanings. The high frequency and polysemy of the character pose a serious problem for Chinese
translation software. The word "tree trunk; to do" (rarely also "human body"), rendered as in simplified Chinese, acquired the meaning of "to
fuck" in Chinese slang. Notoriously, the 2002 edition of the widespread
Jinshan Ciba Chinese-to-English dictionary for the
Jinshan Kuaiyi translation software rendered every occurrence of as "fuck", resulting in a large number of signs with irritating English translations throughout China, often mistranslating "dried" as in "dried fruit" in supermarkets as "fuck the fruits" or similar. ==Sinogram==