What 㺀 means
Crocodile inside 㺀律; a monkey when it stands for 猱.
㺀律 is a literary word for a crocodile. A dictionary cites it in chapter 22 of Water Margin, where it lands as a jab at someone's courage. The monkey reading comes the other way — dictionaries treat 㺀 as a variant of 猱, the monkey character.
Its earliest dictionary witness is the Longkan Shoujian, a Liao Buddhist handbook of difficult characters finished in 997 — its entry already pairs 㺀 with 猱. From there the story is dictionary transmission, not reinvention.
How do I type 㺀?
Enter it by code point — no keyboard offers it.
In Word, type 3E80 and press AltX. On Linux, press CtrlShiftU, type 3e80, then Enter; on a Mac, enable Unicode Hex Input and hold Option while typing 3E80. In code, use \u3E80 where Unicode escapes work — 猱 is not a substitute, just a different character.
If 㺀 shows as a box or its outline shifts between devices, blame font coverage — many fonts skip Extension A ideographs, and references mark 㺀 as one whose drawn form depends on the font. Same code point either way.
Antiquarian — in chat it reads as a rare-character citation, not a mood.
Alone, it will not read as crocodile — that sense lives inside 㺀律.
Who writes 㺀
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What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA literary word for a crocodile; the compound is read hūlǜ.
Related characters
1
Worth knowing
- The crocodile word is also written 忽律 — a homophone spelling, not a different animal.
Questions people ask
3How do you pronounce 㺀?
Two ways — hū in 㺀律 (hūlǜ), náo when it stands for the monkey 猱.
Is 㺀 still used today?
Barely — it lives in dictionaries and old texts; in modern Chinese the crocodile is 鳄, the monkey 猱.
Why does 㺀 look different in another font?
Font coverage — fonts lacking this rare ideograph show a box; others draw its outline differently.
More like this
8
How to type or find 㺀
- Search it as
- hū · hūlǜ · hulu · náo · 㺀律 · 忽律 · 猱 · crocodile
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
㺀\3E80Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.