What 屮 means
It is 屮, used for a sprout or grass.
屮 is a pictorial character for a young plant pushing through soil. A recognizable ancestor appears on bronze inscriptions from the Western Zhou dynasty, an early Chinese dynasty. Later forms occur in Warring States era manuscripts and Han seal script, a formal writing style.
In historical Chinese, 屮 could mean a new sprout or stand for grass. Japanese and Korean dictionaries also record senses tied to a hand, a young sprout, and the old grass radical, a component used to classify characters. These are senses of 屮; 屮 has no separate everyday meaning.
Why does 屮 become 屮?
Unicode normalization maps 屮 to 屮.
屮 is retained for round-tripping text through JIS X 0213, a Japanese character encoding. Its canonical decomposition is 屮, so normalizing a string can erase the source-form distinction.
This is an encoding-preservation choice, not a new everyday word. Use 屮 when the exact source data matters; otherwise use the ordinary character 屮.
Technical and archival: it marks a preserved source form, not a separate word.
Normalization can turn 屮 into 屮; keep the source form only when that distinction matters.
Who writes 屮
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does 屮 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.
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How to type or find 屮
- Search it as
- 屮 · FA3C · 屮 · sprout · old grass radical · grass radical · JIS X 0213 · Unicode normalization
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
屮\FA3CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.