What 廃 means
It marks decline, abandonment, or deliberate discontinuation. In Japanese, the next character narrows the meaning: 廃れる describes something falling out of use, 廃棄 means disposal, and 廃墟 means ruins.
The Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese character dictionary, explains 廢 as a building fallen or made unusable. A bronze inscription uses 灋 (an older written form of 法, “law”) as a borrowed spelling for 廢 in a warning against abandoning a command. This connects the older sense of abandonment with later compounds for discarding things or ending institutions. Japan's 2010 official kanji list pairs 廃 with its older form 廢; traditional Chinese uses 廢, while simplified Chinese uses 废.
In Japanese compounds, it is sober and matter-of-fact: it names decline, disposal, abolition, or ruins.
Alone, 廃 leaves the action unclear; use a complete word when precision matters.
Part of the collection
Who writes 廃
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What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsThe broad signal is disuse or stopping; the exact action is unclear.
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 廃 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.
More like this
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How to type or find 廃
- Also called
- 廢 · 废
- Search it as
- 廃 · hai · sutaru · haishi · haiki · haikyo · disuse · abolition
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
廃\5EC3Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.