What ⺛ means
It marks a radical form used to file Han characters.
The English label “choke” points to 旡’s old lexical gloss. In the Han-era Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese dictionary, 旡 is described as breath blocked after eating.
That old gloss belongs to 旡, not every character filed under Radical 71. Read ⺛ as a lookup cue: find the component, then read the complete character.
Why was this shape preserved?
Its job is visual lookup, not ordinary writing.
Radical indexing became familiar in the Chinese dictionary Zihui (1615); the Kangxi dictionary adopted that tradition in 1716. These reference works group Han characters by a radical, then sort entries by the strokes left over.
Unicode’s radical supplement preserves variant or positional forms so a chart can show the component shape a dictionary user needs. Radical 71 is an index category; its lists distinguish the parent form 无 from a related 旡 form. Japanese lookup names include むにょう and すでのつくり; English “crooked heaven” is a mnemonic for this indexing family.
Technical and lexicographic; it points to dictionary indexing or character analysis, not ordinary writing.
Do not transfer the old “choke” gloss to every character filed under this radical.
Part of the collection
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA key for filing Han characters under this component.
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ⺛ show as a box?
It can. As of 2026-09-06, coverage varies by typeface; a font with CJK Radicals Supplement or a working CJK fallback can display it.
More like this
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How to type or find ⺛
- Also called
- 旡 component · Radical 71 variant · crooked heaven radical
- Search it as
- 旡 · 无 · radical 71 · hanzi radical · kanji radical
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⺛\2E9B⺛ or ⺛ in HTML.\2E9B in CSS or \u2E9B in JSON strings.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.