What 艹 means
Read 艹 as a preserved glyph of the grass component, not as a word.
艹 is the grass component placed over many plant-related Han characters—Chinese-origin characters used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing. Japanese calls this placement くさかんむり (“grass crown”). Its older ancestor is 艸, an early grass sign; oracle-script examples date to around 1250–1000 BC.
FA5D preserves one Japanese source glyph for this component. Its intended meaning therefore comes from the source text; it adds no separate word meaning.
Why does 艹 become 艹?
Normalization turns FA5D into 艹 because FA5D is a compatibility form.
FA5D exists for round-trip conversion with JIS X 0213, a Japanese character set whose entry 2-85-84 pairs this form with 艹. NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD all normalize FA5D to 艹, which can erase the exact character identity.
FA5D and sibling 艹 have different standardized variation sequences for requesting their glyph forms. If a font or text system does not support those sequences, regional CJK font conventions may change the displayed shape, not the component’s role.
Technical and archival: FA5D points to source-encoding or glyph-preservation work, not a word in conversation.
Normalization can replace FA5D with 艹 and erase the source distinction.
Who writes 艹
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Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does 艹 show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Compatibility Ideographs block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
8
How to type or find 艹
- Search it as
- FA5D · FA5E · grass component · grass radical · normalization · kusakanmuri · 草冠 · 草字頭
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
艹\FA5DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.