What 沙 means
In Mandarin, it means sand or fine grit.
Early surviving examples of 沙 appear in Western Zhou inscriptions cast on bronze vessels, where it refers to sand or fine stone in water or near shore.
Other Chinese uses include sandy ground and deserts, granular foods, rough texture, and hoarse sound. Japanese also uses 沙 for sand, shoreline, and sifting. In Buddhist terms for a monk (沙門) and a novice monk (沙弥), it represents sound rather than sand.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
1Sofa; in Chinese forum slang, as of 2026, also the first reply to a post.
Questions people ask
1Why does 沙 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 沙
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 6C99, then Alt+X to get 沙.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “cjk unified ideograph-6c99”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 6c99, then Enter or Space.
HTML
沙CSS
\6C99Mandarin pinyin IME
Type sha, then select 沙 from the candidates.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
沙
HTML hex
沙
CSS content
content: "\6C99";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E6%B2%99
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.