Chinese Character Wu

乌 (pronounced wū) usually means “crow” or “raven,” and by extension “black.” In 金乌 it points to the mythic sun-crow and, by extension, the sun. Traditional Chinese writes the same character as 烏.

Text symbol

What 乌 means

Crow or raven; it can also mean black.

Read the word around it. The character is a pictograph for the crow: 乌鸦 is a crow, 乌云 is dark clouds, and the earliest indexed forms shown are Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. Later senses grow from the black bird: blackness, the sun-crow myth, and classical Chinese “how?” or “where?”

烏 is the Traditional Chinese form of the same character; 鳥/鸟 means “bird” generally. The “missing eye” story is an old dictionary note about crow feathers looking all black, not a rule for every font.

Neutral alone; the compound decides whether it reads as bird, blackness, myth, or old-style rhetoric.

Don't read 金乌 as a literal crow: it is sun imagery.

Who writes 乌

Loading…

Don't confuse it with

烏

CJK Unified Ideograph-70Cf

Traditional Chinese form of 乌; same character, not a separate symbol.

鳥/鸟 Generic “bird”; 乌 narrows the meaning to crow and can extend to black.

Questions people ask

Why does 乌 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.