Chinese character 磤

A rare character for thunder and other booming sounds.

Chinese dictionaries record 磤 as yǐn for thunder and yīn in 砏磤, a word for a stone-related sound. In Mandarin, both readings sound roughly like “yin”: yǐn dips then rises, while yīn stays high and level.

石 is the meaning element, pointing to the stone-related field; 殷 supplies the sound element. Shuowen, an early Chinese dictionary, has no separate headword for 磤; later Chinese dictionaries Yupian and Jiyun do.

Someone sent me 磤—what should I read into it?

Use the surrounding source to choose among its readings.

In Chinese dictionary contexts, it belongs to sound vocabulary. In the Japanese chronicle Nihon shoki, 磤馭慮嶋 spells Onogoro, a mythical island; the Kojiki, another early Japanese chronicle, uses 淤能碁呂島 for the same name.

Those spellings connect 磤 to a particular classical name; they do not make every standalone occurrence a reference to the island.

How do I type 磤?

Use Chinese or Japanese reading-based input, then select the character.

On a Chinese Pinyin keyboard, enter yin and check candidates for yīn or yǐn. With a Japanese IME, enter イン and look among the third-level JIS kanji, a tier in Japan’s character-set classification.

磤 is a font-rendered text character. Fonts may draw it differently or lack it altogether; a box or blank means that font cannot display the character.