[hedora]

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.

[random_ind_dude]

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...

[CRConrad]

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

Naah, the Swedish hypothesis is far more convincing.

[flybarrel]

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