What 既 means
No: they share a meaning, but use different code points.
The ordinary character 既 carries the meaning. In Chinese, it can mean “already” or “complete”; in a paired construction, it can mean “both … and ….” The compatibility character 既 adds no meaning of its own.
既 appears in oracle-bone inscriptions from the Shang period. 旣 is another historical variant of 既; 既 is a digital compatibility encoding, not an ancient spelling.
When should I use 既 instead of 既?
Use 既 only to preserve an exact legacy code point.
Unicode includes FA42 for round-trip compatibility with the Japanese character standard JIS X 0213:2000. That role preserves older text through conversion; it does not make 既 a decorative old-style form.
Unicode assigns 既 a canonical decomposition to 既, so normalization can replace FA42 with the ordinary character. After that change, the original code-point identity is gone.
Neutral; 既 signals exact-text preservation, not emphasis.
Normalization may replace it with 既; do not use 既 for emphasis.
Who writes 既
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Don't confuse it with
2
Questions people ask
1Will 既 look the same in every CJK font?
No. Unicode encodes a character, not one fixed outline; Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts can follow different regional glyph conventions.
More like this
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How to type or find 既
- Search it as
- fa42 · u+fa42 · 既 · 既 · 旣 · JIS X 0213 · 既 compatibility form · 既 variation sequence
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
既\FA42Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.