Bopomofo Letter Ei

It marks the ending sound in a Mandarin syllable.

In Zhuyin, ㄟ usually joins an initial sign to spell a complete syllable; a tone may be marked separately or left unmarked. It belongs to the group of final, or rhyme, signs. On its own, ㄟ can also be used like an interjection, but it has no fixed English translation.

Someone sent me ㄟ. What does it mean here?

It may be a conversational cue, not a word to translate.

Alone, ㄟ can stand in for the interjection written as 欸 or 誒. After a phrase, a Zhuyin spelling such as ㄌㄟ can act like a sentence-ending particle. Read the surrounding message and any tone mark to catch the intended voice.

How did ㄟ enter Zhuyin?

It belongs to a system made to show Mandarin pronunciation.

The first version of Zhuyin was created in 1913 and released in 1918. The system marks pronunciation beside Chinese characters and supports teaching, dictionary work, and phonetic typing. ㄟ was part of that system; its history is not a separate one-off invention.

Accounts of the glyph’s source differ: one connects its shape to 乀, an old character for a slanting brush stroke; another proposes a link to a simplified form of 飛. These are competing origin accounts, not a settled explanation.