What 穀 means
Exactly what 穀 means: grain and cereal crops.
穀 is the character for grain in words like 穀物 'grain,' 五穀 'the five grains,' 稻穀 'unhusked rice' and 穀雨 'Grain Rain,' the last solar term of spring. Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean hanja all write it 穀; Simplified Chinese merges the grain sense into 谷, a character that originally meant 'valley.'
Why is 穀 a separate character from 穀?
To keep old Taiwanese-standard text round-trippable.
Taiwan's CNS 11643-1992 character set catalogues this source shape as T4-455F, an entry in its Plane 4 table: a variant drawing of 穀, not a different word. Unicode added 穀 in 2001 so text could travel between Unicode and that standard in both directions without losing which entry it started as.
NFC, Unicode's standard tidy form for text, folds 穀 back into 穀 and erases the old distinction — software that normalizes on paste, save or search can quietly rewrite it. When the exact recorded shape matters, the standardized sequence 穀︁ (U7A40 UFE01) requests it: 穀 followed by the invisible Variation Selector-2.
Which of the two should you write?
穀 — or 谷 in Simplified Chinese; 穀 is for old data.
If your copy of 穀 shows as a hollow box, nothing is necessarily broken: it lives out in Plane 2, beyond the block of everyday characters, and font support out there is patchy — the data itself is usually intact. And if a pasted 穀 arrives as 穀, an app normalized it along the way; the meaning hasn't changed. Keep 穀 for reproducing legacy CNS-encoded data, and reach for 穀︁ when the variant shape itself is the point.
Who writes 穀
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Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Worth knowing
- 穀雨, 'Grain Rain,' is the last solar term of spring, falling around 20 April — named for the rains that feed the young grain.
- Because Simplified Chinese folded 穀 into 谷, Google's Chinese name 谷歌 uses the character that can mean either 'valley' or 'grain.'
Questions people ask
2Why did my 穀 turn into 穀 when I pasted it?
The app normalized your text. NFC, Unicode's standard tidy form, maps compatibility ideographs like 穀 onto their unified partners, so the character arrives as 穀.
Does 穀 appear in real writing?
Rarely, and mostly as a leftover: it's a legacy compatibility character, not one people type. A sighting in a message or document has typically come through old converted data.
More like this
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How to type or find 穀
- Search it as
- 穀 · 穀︁ · t4-455f · cns 11643 · grain · cereal · gu · han character · unicode variant
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
穀\2F959Why is 穀 a box on my screen?
fsymbols draws rare signs with its own fonts, so they show here even where your device has none. An app or website without such a font shows an empty box (□) or a question mark instead. Turn our fonts off to see each sign as your device draws it by itself: a box here means a box in your chats and documents too.
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.