CJK Compatibility Ideograph 2F91D

𤉣 encodes the older graph 𤉣, a historical form of 災. The word means “disaster.”

The transmitted wording of the Yishan Stele, a carved stone inscription from the Qin era dated 219 BCE, includes “𤉣害滅除,” roughly “may disaster and harm be removed.” A 2021 paleographic study argues that 災 developed by structural change from 𤉣 and links 𤉣 to 甾 with the fire component 火 added. The original stele no longer survives, so later copies cannot establish the earliest exact shape.

Why does 𤉣 become two characters?

The two-character form keeps the source glyph distinction. The pair 𤉣︀ uses U+24263 plus U+FE00; Unicode 18.0 lists it as the standardized variant, with Variation Selector-1—the invisible second character—requesting that glyph form. Normalization can rewrite the single character as this sequence, so raw text matching should account for both canonically equivalent spellings.

Unicode includes this character for round-trip conversion with CNS 11643-1992, Taiwan’s national coded-character standard, notably planes 3–7 and 15. It lets text converted from that standard return without losing the distinction; Unicode reserves it for that compatibility job rather than ordinary prose.