What 璽 means
A ruler’s or state’s seal of authority.
璽 differs from 印, the broader Chinese word for a seal. Before Qin unified China, 璽 could name seals across ranks; after Qin, it became the ruler’s special seal term.
The seal tradition is older: mature Chinese seals appear by late Shang, and seals were widely used for verification in the Warring States. They marked people, families, offices, or rank: early seals left impressions in clay, while later ones stamped ink onto paper. Japanese keeps 璽 in formal compounds: 玉璽 means a sovereign’s seal, and 御璽 the emperor’s seal.
Formal, ruler-facing, and historical; 印 is the broader term for seals.
For an ordinary stamp, 璽 can sound grandiose; 印 is the broader word.
Part of the collection
Who writes 璽
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does 璽 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
10
How to type or find 璽
- Also called
- 玺 · 壐 · xǐ
- Search it as
- seal · signet · imperial · royal · 玉璽 · 御璽 · gyokuji · gyoji
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
璽\74BDCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.