What ㇃ means
It shows one continuous stroke with a hooked ending.
Chinese characters are built from strokes: movements made without lifting the pen or brush. A stroke can bend and still count as one. In 心, ㇃ represents the broad, curved stroke with an upward hook; the separate dots belong to the rest of the character.
Writing the stroke separately makes it possible to describe and classify character shapes. Stroke notation also helps reference works index or sort characters. Here, Bxg is a technical stroke label, not a word to read aloud in a sentence.
Why can the stroke look different in print?
Writing styles give the corresponding stroke different shapes.
Unicode associates ㇃ with Kaiti, a typeface style based on regular brush calligraphy. In Songti, a style used for printed text, the corresponding stroke is represented by . This is a difference in how the stroke is drawn within characters.
The standalone symbols ㇃ and are separately encoded characters. Their relationship does not make them interchangeable in text or searches.
Technical notation for describing character strokes, rather than an ordinary word or an expression of affection.
Part of the collection
Related characters
2
Worth knowing
- This standalone stroke was included in Hong Kong’s Supplementary Character Set, HKSCS-2001, before it entered Unicode.
Questions people ask
1Why does ㇃ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the CJK Strokes 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 ㇃
- Search it as
- bxg · hooked stroke · 扁斜鉤 · 扁斜钩 · 臥鉤 · 卧钩 · 心 stroke
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.