What ⺘ means
It labels the hand component in radical reference charts.
Radical notation indexes Han characters—Chinese-derived characters used in Chinese, Japanese, and historically Korean writing—and describes their parts. The hand radical’s history reaches back to Western Zhou, an early Chinese dynasty: bronze inscriptions from that period include 手, the full hand character. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character analysis, 扌 is the left-side hand component; Japanese calls it te-hen, or the hand radical at the left. It can suggest a hand-related element but does not decide a character’s meaning. ⺘ is the separate radical-catalog character mapped to 扌.
Technical and reference-oriented; it signals component lookup or character analysis, not ordinary text.
Use 手 for the full character and 扌 for its left-side component.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Questions people ask
1Why does ⺘ 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
8
How to type or find ⺘
- Search it as
- hand radical · radical 64 · ⺘ 扌 difference · ⺘ 手 difference · hand radical history · ⺘ input · U+2E98 · 2E98
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⺘\2E98Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.