U+58DE "壞" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+58DE "壞" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character that primarily means "bad," "broken," or "to spoil," and it is a traditional form distinct from its simplified counterpart "坏." In East Asian languages, it appears in contexts ranging from moral judgments, such as describing a corrupt person, to physical descriptions of damaged objects, like a ruined building. The character is composed of the radical "土" (earth, soil) on the left, which sometimes relates to physical destruction, and a complex phonetic component on the right that hints at its pronunciation (huài in Mandarin). This ideograph has historical usage across Classical Chinese texts, modern Mandarin, Japanese kanji (where it can also mean "to break" or "harm"), and Korean hanja, retaining its core connotations of deterioration or negative quality. Despite its negative semantic field, it remains a fundamental character for expressing concepts of defectiveness or degradation in both literary and everyday communication.