What ㇄ means
It names a pen movement used to write Han characters. The path goes down and bends at the end. Han characters are Chinese-origin written characters used in Chinese, Japanese, and some Korean writing.
Chinese stroke terminology calls it 竖弯 in Simplified Chinese and 豎彎 in Traditional Chinese; both names mean vertical bend. The label describes one stroke, not a word to read as a sentence.
The pen movement was part of writing long before this separate label was encoded. Unicode's first CJK Strokes set was added for compatibility with Hong Kong's HKSCS-2001. Later additions reflected forms in representative Han characters and source glyphs that came before Han unification—the process of encoding corresponding Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character forms together. These stroke labels help software index and sort characters by how they are written.
How do I type ㇄?
Use a Unicode input method that accepts U31C4. This technical stroke label is unlikely to appear in ordinary Chinese word prediction, so a Unicode-value method is the dependable route.
Technical notation for CJK stroke charts, character indexing, and glyph data; it feels out of place in ordinary prose.
If it arrives alone, treat it as a stroke label and ask what context the sender intended.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
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Questions people ask
1Why does ㇄ show as an empty box?
A font without this glyph may display a missing-character placeholder. In 2024, Taiwan's CNS 11643 character registry listed default Windows fonts as lacking it and documented a custom-font route.
More like this
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How to type or find ㇄
- Also called
- 竖弯 · 豎彎 · shù wān
- Search it as
- sw · shuwan
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㇄\31C4Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.