What 眂 means
It is an alternate graph for 視, the seeing-and-looking word. The Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese character dictionary, analyzes 眂 as 目 (“eye”) plus 氏. The Taiwan Ministry of Education’s variant dictionary records it under 視.
Other character catalogues record 眎 and 眡 in this family. Classical citations, including the Zhouli, an early text on ritual and government, use 眂 in contexts glossed as showing, governing, or comparing.
Mandarin reads it as shì: begin with a hissing sound made with the tongue slightly curled back, then an “ee” vowel; lower your voice through the syllable. Cantonese records si6 in Jyutping: an “s” sound followed by “ee,” held low and level.
Modern Chinese normally uses 視 or 视; choosing 眂 can signal that a source or variant spelling is being preserved.
Outside a source transcription, readers may mistake it for an error.
Questions people ask
1Why can 眂 appear as an empty box?
The selected font may lack a glyph for it. Unicode identifies the character; the font determines whether it can draw it, so another compatible font may display it.
How to type 眂
眂\7702Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.