What 磢 means
It means scouring, rubbing, or a gorge, depending on context.
Older dictionary glosses describe washing an object with broken tile or stone. The compound 磢错 uses the rubbing sense, while 七里磢 appears as a place name with the terrain sense.
The earliest recorded example is in 《类篇》, a Chinese character dictionary from the Song dynasty, where 磢 is glossed as washing or polishing. The earlier dictionary 《说文》 does not list it.
Should I send 磢 by itself?
Ask for the surrounding word or source first.
A one-character message leaves all three documented readings open. If you are quoting a text or preserving a place name, keep 磢; if you are writing a new message, spell out the full term so the reader does not have to guess.
A source-specific Chinese character: precise in a quotation or named term, opaque as an unexplained one-character message.
Do not reduce it to “clean”: rubbing and gorge senses are also recorded.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsCombination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 磢 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 磢
磢\78E2Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.