CJK Compatibility Ideograph FA8C

Read its meaning through 戴: wear, put on, or support.

The Chinese character 戴 means wearing or putting on something, especially on the head, and also supporting or honoring a ruler. In oracle-bone rain questions, it sometimes serves a grammatical role instead. A bronze inscription uses 戴 for 熾, meaning bright and flourishing.

The earliest forms appear on oracle bones—bones used for divination—with a person lifting 甾 over the head. Bronze forms replace 甾 with 皿 and add 戠, a part that hints at the reading. During the Warring States period, before China was unified, and in bamboo-slip texts, forms use 首 (head) plus a sound hint; some slips use different sound hints. Qin-Han forms pair 異 and 𢦏, leading toward the later small-seal script, a formal ancient writing style.

Why does FA8C turn into 戴?

Compatibility normalization maps FA8C to 戴.

Unicode gives FA8C a compatibility mapping to 戴. The standardized sequence 戴 followed by FE00 can preserve a source-specific glyph. NFKC and NFKD apply compatibility mappings, so FA8C may normalize to 戴 and lose its original code-point identity.

Unicode included FA8C to round-trip older encoded text; its chart associates it with KPS, a North Korean character-set source. For ordinary Chinese writing, use 戴. Preserve FA8C, or the standardized 戴 + FE00 sequence where supported, only when the source distinction matters.