CJK Stroke WG

It labels a curved-hook stroke in Han-character structure. CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Han characters originated in China and appear in Chinese and Japanese writing and historical Korean and Vietnamese texts. The Chinese stroke name 彎鉤 means “curved hook”; WG takes the initials from its spelling in Pinyin, Mandarin’s Latin-letter system. Unicode’s reference example uses ㇁ for the second stroke of 狐 (“fox”). The same stroke type appears in 犭, the animal component, and at the lower right of ⻖.

The stroke type predates its computer encoding: it was already part of Han-character analysis. Hong Kong’s HKSCS-2001 character set carried the first CJK stroke repertoire in private-use character slots; Unicode later encoded a dedicated set. That encoding history made stroke symbols available for structural lookup and sorting.

Why was ㇁ encoded?

To help software describe and index Han-character structure. The encoding proposal kept stroke symbols separate from ideographs and radicals so software could index and collate forms, including ones without their own encoded character. An ideographic description sequence (IDS) describes how character parts are arranged; CJK strokes such as ㇁ can fill a component position in one. The sequence describes structure, not a spoken reading.

Why does ㇁ look like ㇓?

Some fonts hide the visible difference between the strokes. They may draw ㇁ almost like ㇓, but the two are different stroke types with different directions. For a tiny or blurry specimen, check the surrounding stroke analysis before treating one glyph as the other.