What 业 means
Work, trade, industry or study, set by the surrounding word.
Its traditional form 業 once named a decorated board mounted above a frame hung with bells and drums. It already appears in the Classic of Poetry, China's oldest poetry anthology (c. 11th–7th centuries BCE). Japanese keeps 業: read gyō for work and study, and gō for karma in Buddhism — the moral weight of one's actions.
A plain word-building character; if someone sends only 业, ask for the whole word before translating.
Don't read karma into a lone 业; that sense needs a Buddhist context.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does 业 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type 业
业\4E1ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.