What 庶 means
No; 庶 is an encoded form of 庶.
In Chinese, 庶 can mean “many” or “ordinary people”; Japanese uses it with those senses in 庶民 (“ordinary people”) and 庶務 (“general affairs”).
The mapped character's old forms are recorded in oracle-bone inscriptions (divination marks carved on bones), bronze writing, Chu manuscripts, and seal script. Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese character dictionary, explains it as “many beneath a roof”; other accounts trace it to cooking, so its origin is disputed. Historical Chinese also used 庶 for commoners, collateral family branches, children of secondary wives, and “hope.”
Why is 庶 a separate code point?
It preserves a legacy text-encoding mapping.
Unicode includes this supplement for round-trip compatibility with CNS 11643-1992's planes 3–7 and 15, Taiwan's national character standard. This lets text encoded there pass through Unicode and return to the same entry.
Unicode maps 庶 canonically to 庶, so normalization collapses the distinction. Keep the special form only when a source dataset needs that legacy mapping.
Questions people ask
1Why does 庶 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type 庶
庶\2F88DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.