problematic character analysis however the chinese characters of qilin and both carry the chinese deer radical suggesting that they were conceived of as a deer like animal or perhaps a kind of antelope i have removed this unsourced sentence from the origins section of the article for the following reasons as the lede states the characters in qilin can also be written with the horse radical maybe a more recent less traditional variant but this would have to be addressed and sourced the giraffe is also conceived of as a deer like animal in chinese in fact even more explicitly than the qilin the word for giraffe means long necked deer