I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?

I'm confused too.

Their posts brought up two points:

1. Y might be for yellow than axe.

-- I agree but that remains a theory.

2. The designer likely used a clipart of axe by searching "axe" in Chinese ("斧头"). The exact image was found.

-- ..OK? Not sure how this means anything, let alone "solved".

To be fair, other comments in that 2017 threads confused me too, e.g.

> 1. The letter 'A' and an upside down Y-shaped character share the same key on a Chinese/English key board

I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about, as a native-Chinese speaker.

I was wondering the same. After a little searching, I reckon they're referring to 人 on a keyboard using a dàyì layout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayi_method

My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway

> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about

The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.

Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y.

Combining that:

> 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese.

and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art:

> Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language which I found via google translate is 斧头

However, 斧头 doesn't yield anything that starts with Y, and Google image search doesn't really seem to understand that that 鉞 (yuè) means axe. Duck Duck Go image search returns pictures of axes for 鉞, but doesn't show the original clip art in the top of its search results.

At any rate, it's unlikely the designer was using either of those search engines. Perhaps some Chinese search engine displays the "translation" of 鉞 to yué, and also provides the correct clipart.

I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.

The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.

Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_axe#/media/File%3ACMO...

So does the Chinese (Mandarin? Cantonese?) word for "submarine" begin with a 'U'...?

Naah, the Swedish hypothesis is far more convincing.

you don't learn about this character normally in China. So I would say it is impossible this is the explanation.