What ㇐ means
Enter 31D0 in your editor’s Unicode input tool; the keystroke depends on your setup.
What does ㇐ mean?
It marks one horizontal stroke in Han-character analysis.
In Chinese, this stroke is called 橫, meaning “horizontal.” A stroke of this kind begins 大 and 七; ㇐ names the line shape, not the meaning of either whole character. As a stroke label, it is not read aloud like a word and does not carry a whole character’s meaning.
The encoded character came later
A 2006 Unicode proposal assembled a shared set of CJK stroke signs from strokes found in representative Han characters. ㇐ entered Unicode in 2008, long after horizontal strokes were already part of writing.
The set helps index and sort Han characters and radicals, recurring components used to group characters. In an Ideographic Description Sequence (IDS), a compact notation for a character’s parts and their layout, ㇐ can be one component; ⿱ marks a top-over-bottom arrangement. Taiwan’s Ministry of Education guide from 2025 places a horizontal stroke before a crossing vertical one. That is a writing-order convention, not the standalone meaning of ㇐.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ㇐ look different in different fonts?
Unicode’s chart shapes are references, not required designs. A font may change the line’s weight or contour without changing the character’s role.
How to type ㇐
㇐\31D0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.