What 勞 means
It means labor, toil, or hard work.
勞 is a compatibility form of 勞, not a newly invented sign. Its oldest surviving forms appear in oracle-bone inscriptions—marks carved on bones and shells for divination—and in bronze inscriptions. Later Chinese writing styles included seal, clerical, and regular scripts.
The character's senses grew from labor and exertion to fatigue, making someone work, rewarding workers, and worry. The same character family appears as 劳 in simplified Chinese and 労 in Japanese; Korean Hanja, the use of Chinese characters in Korean, uses 勞.
Why does 勞 exist as a separate code point?
It preserves a Korean legacy encoding distinction.
The KS X 1001:1998 compatibility mapping records 勞 as a form corresponding to 勞. Korean catalogues pair it with the Hangul syllable 노 (roughly n followed by a short, rounded o) and list 勞 as a valid alternative. Keep 勞 for a legacy data path or an exact-match check; ordinary new text uses 勞.
Each font draws the character in its own style, so its visible shape can vary.
Technical and archival: it signals an encoding or cataloguing concern, not conversational tone.
Replacing 勞 with 勞 casually can erase the legacy distinction; normalization can do the same.
Who writes 勞
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
2Is 勞 only used in Korean?
No. Its separate mapping and reading 노 come from a Korean legacy standard, while the corresponding character 勞 belongs to the wider Han-character tradition.
Why does 勞 sometimes show as a box?
It can. The active font may not include a glyph for this character, so the app displays a box or replacement mark; the text's meaning has not changed.
More like this
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How to type or find 勞
- Search it as
- f92f · 勞 · 劳 · 労 · 노 · hanja · legacy hanja · labor character
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
勞\F92FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.