What ⺾ means
It identifies the grass radical for dictionary indexing.
In early Chinese oracle-bone writing, 屮 marked a sprout; doubling it formed 艸. The Chinese dictionary Shuowen, completed in 100 CE, defines 草 as an acorn cup; later 草 became the everyday grass character, while 艸 remained a radical.
Unicode maps ⺾ to 艹, the ordinary Han component, as a simplified form of grass radical 140 in the Kangxi dictionary.
Technical; ⺾ reads like a character-structure note.
Write 艹 in ordinary Han text, not ⺾.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ⺾ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Radicals Supplement 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
11
How to type or find ⺾
- Also called
- grass radical · grass component · radical 140
- Search it as
- 草字头 · 草花頭 · 艹 · 艸
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⺾\2EBECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.