What 罷 means
The surrounding word decides which sense 罷 carries.
An early description from the oracle-bone period pictures a net over an animal; recognizable forms appear in Qin slips from the late Warring States and Qin period, including legal texts. 說文 explains 网 plus 能 as releasing a guilty person, while later analysis links the same image to exhaustion.
罷工 means a strike; 罷免 removes an officeholder; sentence-final 罷了 means “merely” or softens a request like 吧. As of 2026, Japanese dictionaries also list 罷業 and 罷免, read hi. Alone, 罷 is context-poor, so translate the whole word; in simplified Chinese, write 罢.
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 罷 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 罷
罷\7F77Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.