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Ideogrammic compound (會意 / 会意): 臣(“eye”) + 戈(“spear;weapon”) – "slave; prisoner of war" (slaves in ancient China were blinded, hence the 臣 component. Hence, the original version is 𦣣.
The phonetic component 爿 (OC*zaŋ), absent in the oracle-bone script, was added at a later stage (see Yang, 1965, and references therein), leading Shuowen to interpret the character as a phono-semantic compound (形聲 / 形声, OC*ʔsaːŋ): phonetic 戕(OC*kaːl, *ʔsaːŋ, *zaŋ) + semantic 臣.