CJK Stroke SZ (vertical-turn stroke)

A single stroke: down, then a sharp right turn.

Chinese characters are built from a small set of strokes, each with a name. 竖 (shù) means vertical and 折 (zhé) means turn or fold, so 竖折 is a vertical line that turns right at a corner without lifting the brush. You write it as the second stroke of 山, and as the final stroke of 亡 and 区. The same stroke appears in characters used in Japanese and Korean writing.

Dictionaries and stroke-input keyboards group all strokes into five families in the order 横 (horizontal), 竖 (vertical), 撇 (left-falling), 点 (dot), 折 (turning). Because it bends, ㇗ belongs to the 折 family, even though it starts vertically. When you count strokes to look up a character, it counts as one.

Why is a stroke a separate character?

So textbooks and dictionaries can print individual strokes as text.

Unicode added the CJK Strokes block so teaching materials, stroke-order charts and character databases can show a stroke on its own instead of as a picture. Its first forms came from Hong Kong’s Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). The shape drawn varies a little between fonts; if you see an empty box, your font lacks it.