Small starter-cake character

Type pi in a Chinese pinyin input method and check the candidates. The dictionary reading is pí, roughly like “pee” said with a rising pitch. Pinyin writes Chinese sounds with Latin letters. If the character is absent from the suggestions, look up U+4D3D in a Unicode character picker; Cangjie, a shape-based Chinese input method, lists JEHWJ.

What does 䴽 mean?

䴽 names a small or fine cake of a Chinese grain starter. 麴 is the general Chinese term for this starter, used to brew alcohol. 方言, a Han dynasty wordbook of regional speech, records 䴽 as a name for 麴 in the northern Yan region of ancient China. The passage is preserved in the encyclopedia 太平御覽. Later dictionaries give 䴽 the narrower gloss “small or fine starter cake.” The wordbook groups it with 䴭, 䴳, 䵆, and 䴹, regional names around 麴.

Why does 䴽 look different in my font?

The character is the same; fonts may draw it differently. Fonts for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can use region-specific shapes for the same character. A font without this rare glyph may show a blank or missing-character box; the text still contains 䴽.