CJK Unified Ideograph-3E82

It names a strong sheep, a ewe, or a dog.

Read yán for the sheep senses — dictionaries gloss it as “sheep with strength” and “female sheep”; read gǎn for a dog name. A separate xián entry is only a cross-reference, so a single phonetic guess can miss it.

The build is phono-semantic: 犭 marks the animal domain and 咸 supplies the sound — its job was writing a narrow animal word. Its earliest attestation in this exact form is in the Song period, in the rhyme dictionaries Guangyun and Jiyun. In the Ming era, the name-and-thing compendium 名物類考 applied it to a dog's piercing bark.

Is 㺂 the same as 羬 or 麙?

Not consistently — treat them as related forms, not automatic substitutes.

An Erya commentary — Erya is the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary — says 麙 was written 㺂 in some copies. Taiwan's Ministry of Education variant dictionary groups 羬 with 麙 and 𦏣 in the same large-sheep word family, so which glyph an edition prints matters.

Why does 㺂 show as a box?

Usually a missing font, not a different character.

The Unicode chart says its reference glyph is not prescriptive, so stroke balance varies by font. If the active font and its fallbacks lack this Extension A character, it renders as a hollow box — the code point underneath is unchanged.