What 喳 means
It imitates voice and sound; the phrase sets the reading.
In Mandarin, 喳喳 (zhāzhā) gives a bird call or loud cry. A Song dynasty poem uses it for magpies, and Yuan dynasty drama uses it for a high cry. In 嘁嘁喳喳 (qīqīchāchā), read 喳 as chā: the whole phrase means quiet, indistinct talk. The character pairs 口, “mouth,” with 查 as its sound cue.
When does 喳 mean “yes”?
Only in Qing-dynasty court hierarchy.
During the Qing dynasty, 喳 was a Manchu-language exclamation used by a subordinate to answer a superior, roughly “Yes” or “I’m here.” It is a deferential reply, distinct from the character’s sound-word uses.
Why does 喳 normalize to 喳?
Unicode maps it to 喳 for compatibility.
It preserves a Taiwan source form from CNS 11643-1992, a national character-set standard. Unicode maps it to 喳 and lists 喳︀ (U55B3 followed by UFE00) as the standardized variation sequence for the source glyph. Normalizing 喳 to the base character removes that distinction.
Sound words are colloquial; the Qing-era reply is deferential.
Outside a Qing-dynasty scene, don’t assume a bare 喳 means “yes.”
Who writes 喳
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What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA repeated bird call or a loud cry.
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does 喳 show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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How to type or find 喳
- Search it as
- 喳 · 喳喳 · 嘁嘁喳喳 · zhā · chā
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
喳\2F849Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.