U+690E "椎" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+690E "椎" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character that primarily denotes a "mallet" or "hammer," especially a wooden one used in percussion or striking, such as a drumstick or a vertebra-shaped tool, from which its extended meaning includes "vertebra" in anatomical contexts due to the bone's resemblance to a mallet. In modern usage, it appears in words like "腰椎" (lumbar vertebra) and "椎体" (vertebral body) in medical terminology, while in classical texts it can refer to a blunt weapon or a pestle. This character is composed of the "wood" radical on the left and the phonetic component "隹" (zhuī, meaning short-tailed bird) on the right, contributing to its pronunciation as "chuí" or "zhuī" in Mandarin, with the former being more common for the mallet meaning and the latter for the spinal sense.