What 啋 means
It answers the bad-luck remark, not the person. By 2017, 啋 was recorded as a Cantonese reply to an inauspicious remark—roughly “touch wood” said back to the person who brought up the omen. The speaker wards off the bad luck rather than calling the listener unlucky.
Older dictionaries give 啋 several speech uses: an exclamation, a sentence-ending particle (a small word that adds tone), and a sense glossed as noisy or unsettled. Yuan period plays also use it for “lucky,” linking this sense to 彩. These records show a broader written history than the modern Cantonese reply alone suggests.
When does 啋 become a rebuke?
It becomes a rebuke when the reply targets the speaker. In 啋過你, the bad-luck suggestion is thrown back at “you”; 啋過你把口 adds “that mouth,” making it a blunt demand to stop saying it. Because this is colloquial written Cantonese rather than a neutral Mandarin interjection, readers outside that usage may miss the cue.
Colloquial written Cantonese: a quick ward against an omen that can sharpen into a rebuke.
啋過你把口 can mean “shut your mouth”; it is a rebuke, not just an omen ward.
Who writes 啋
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 啋 look different in fonts?
It can be the same character in different regional fonts. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts may draw Han characters in different conventional styles; Unicode identifies the character, not one fixed shape.
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How to type or find 啋
- Search it as
- coi1 · cai1 · 啋過你 · 啋過你把口 · touch wood · don’t jinx it · Cantonese interjection · bad luck reply
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
啋\554BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.