掠

A phono-semantic compound:

手 (hand) — semantic component, classifies the character within the domain of physical action performed by the hand — grasping, seizing, taking by force;

京 (capital city; a great city) — phonetic component, supplies the reading 략 (ryak / lüè).

The mnemonic suggested in Korean tradition is vivid and apt: to sweep the capital clean with one's hand — 서울을 손으로 털어버리다 — the image of a raiding force stripping a great city of everything of value.

掠 appears in historical, military, and literary contexts. In modern Korean the compound 노략질 is understood but somewhat archaic in everyday speech; the simpler 빼앗다 (to seize; to take by force) carries the same meaning in daily use.

노략 (擄掠) — plunder; pillage; the seizure of people and goods by raiding force

약탈 (掠奪) — plunder; looting; forcible seizure of property

침략 (侵掠) — invasion and plunder; military aggression combined with looting

엄습 (掠襲) — a surprise raid; a swift plundering attack

Idiomatic expressions:

약탈경제 (掠奪經濟) — a plunder economy; an economic system built on the extraction and seizure of resources from the weak by the powerful rather than on productive creation.

掠 occupies a precise register of violence: not the violence of direct combat but the violence of taking — the hand reaching out and stripping what belongs to another. Its semantic root 手 makes this explicit: this is not a sword-character or a fire-character but a hand-character, and the hand in 掠 is the grasping, emptying hand of the raider rather than the building, giving hand of craft or generosity.

The mnemonic preserved in Korean tradition — sweeping the capital clean with one's hand — compresses the character's full meaning into a single image. A capital city is the greatest concentration of wealth, art, population, and power in any realm. To 掠 a capital is the supreme act of plunder: everything accumulated by civilization seized in a single violent passage. The phonetic component 京 thus does double duty as sound and as the ultimate object of the action 掠 describes.

Note on Japanese usage:

Іn Japanese the character 掠 has been largely replaced in practice by 略 (U+7565), which shares the same reading and carries overlapping meanings of invasion and seizure alongside its primary sense of abbreviation. The substitution likely occurred because 略 already covered the military senses of attacking and taking, making the distinction between the two characters functionally redundant in Japanese usage. It reflects a broader tendency in Japanese script history to rationalize near-synonyms into a single form.

略 (략/ ryaku) carries the meanings of to abbreviate, to omit, to plan, and also to invade and seize — the last of these sufficient to absorb the function of 掠 in military contexts. The two characters remain distinct in Korean and Chinese usage, where 掠 retains its specific plundering register and 略 retains its own field.

Related characters:

擄 — to capture people; to take captives (paired with 掠 in 擄掠)

奪 — to seize; to snatch (paired with 掠 in 掠奪)

侵 — to invade; to encroach (paired with 掠 in 侵掠)

搶 — to grab; to loot (close synonym in modern Chinese)

Among characters of forcible taking, 掠 is the most specifically military and territorial.

奪 describes the act of snatching in any context;

搶 is the quick grab;

掠 is the systematic stripping of a place or people — plunder as a deliberate military and economic act.

Classical citations:

《史記·項羽本紀》 (Records of the Grand Historian)

「燒秦宮室，掠鹵婦女財物」

"He burned the palaces of Qin and plundered women and goods."

One of the most cited classical uses of 掠, recording Xiang Yu's sack of the Qin capital — the very image of 掠京, the capital stripped bare, that the mnemonic tradition preserves.

《漢書·匈奴傳》 (Book of Han)

「數侵掠邊境，殺略人民」

"They repeatedly raided and plundered the frontier, killing and seizing the people."

A representative use of 侵掠 in the context of nomadic raiding — the compound that became the standard historical term for border plunder across the Han dynastic records.

《三國志·魏書·武帝紀》 (Records of the Three Kingdoms)

「掠民財物，燒其廬舍」

"They plundered the people's goods and burned their homes."

Cao Cao's account of enemy depredations — 掠 used here to distinguish the taking of property from the burning of structures, confirming its precise meaning of seizure rather than destruction.