Nose compatibility form

It represents 鼻, the Han character for “nose.”

Unicode maps 鼻 to 鼻. As part of a Unicode block for round-trip conversion with Taiwanese CNS 11643-1992 planes 3–7 and 15, it preserves a source distinction. Unicode says this form has no general writing use. Normalization, software’s way of making equivalent text comparable, can merge it with 鼻.

鼻’s story reaches back to earlier Chinese writing: around 1300 BCE, 自 appears as a nose picture in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions used for royal divination. That sign also came to mean “self”; later, 畀 was added as a sound component to distinguish 鼻 as the nose word.