CJK Compatibility Ideograph FA80

婢 is a compatibility form of 婢 meaning “female servant.”

The underlying Han character 婢 refers to a woman in a low-status servant role. Older Chinese dictionaries also record it for women from convicted families assigned to official service, and as a woman's humble self-reference. Japanese reference works preserve its servant sense in compounds such as 奴婢 and 婢妾.

婢 appears in the Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese dictionary. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary record lists no oracle-bone or bronze form (2024). 婢 itself is a modern encoding form: the FA70–FAD9 range supports round-trip conversion with KPS 10721-2000, a North Korean supplementary Hanja standard. Hanja are Chinese characters used in Korean writing. 婢 marks encoding compatibility, not a new word meaning.

Why does 婢 turn into 婢 or look different?

Normalization can change the code point; fonts can change its shape.

Each of Unicode's four normalization forms—NFC, NFD, NFKC, and NFKD—maps 婢 to 婢, removing the separate code-point identity. Preserve 婢 only when legacy round-trip data or exact character identity matters.

A font determines how a Han character is drawn. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts may follow different regional conventions; a font without FA80 coverage can show a missing-glyph box. A shape difference alone does not create another meaning.