What ⺗ means
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Search for “CJK Radical Heart Two” and select that radical character. Chinese references also call the bottom heart form 心字底, literally “heart at the bottom”; a radical is a character component used for lookup or description.
心 is the recognizable ancestor: its pictorial form appears in Shang-era oracle-bone writing—inscriptions on animal bones and turtle shells—and on bronze vessels. The heart component changes with position: 忄 is used on the left, while 心, ⺗, and 㣺 are bottom-position forms. Japanese references use 下心 as a positional label.
Why isn't ⺗ the same as 心?
⺗ is a radical symbol; 心 is an ordinary character.
In ordinary writing, 心 can mean the physical heart, mind, thought, feeling, intention, or moral character. ⺗ identifies the heart component in a radical index or character description; alone, it does not select one of those meanings.
Unicode keeps radical symbols and ordinary characters distinct. When the component identity matters, use ⺗; when writing a word, use the ordinary character 心.
Technical reference notation: it identifies a heart component rather than expressing a feeling.
In ordinary writing, 心 is the character; ⺗ labels the radical.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ⺗ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
8
How to type or find ⺗
- Also called
- 心字底 · 竖心底 · 下心
- Search it as
- ⺗ · bottom heart radical
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⺗\2E97Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.