What ⺅ means
It is a person radical for the left-side form of 人.
The standalone 人 means “person” in Chinese. In the Han script—a character system used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing—the left-side component is written 亻. ⺅ is the separate radical symbol used to label that positional form in reference charts, not the component inside ordinary text.
In early Chinese writing, 人 appears in oracle-bone inscriptions—divination texts carved on bone and shell—as a profile-like drawing of a person. Its outline changed through bronze inscriptions, seal script, clerical script, and standard script into the modern form. Radical dictionaries group characters by shared components so readers can look them up; ⺅ belongs to that indexing tradition.
Is ⺅ the same as 亻 or 人?
They are related forms with different jobs.
人 is the complete character for “person”; 亻 is the form used inside a character when that component is on the left; ⺅ is a separate symbol for referring to the radical. In an ideographic description sequence—a text formula that breaks a character into parts—use 亻 for the left component, not ⺅.
Unicode's CJK radical charts include regional shape variants, so the same radical may have different outlines across script conventions.
Technical reference symbol: use it in radical charts or writing-system notes, not as the form inside ordinary character text.
Inside an ideographic description, use 亻 for the component; ⺅ is only the reference symbol.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ⺅ look like 亻 but behave differently?
They are related, not interchangeable. ⺅ is a radical reference symbol; 亻 is the left-side component used inside a character.
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How to type or find ⺅
- Also called
- person radical · 亻 radical · ninben
- Search it as
- ⺅ meaning · 亻 · left-side person radical
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⺅\2E85Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.