What 聪 means
聪 means “clever” or “quick to understand”; it can also describe keen hearing. In modern Chinese it appears in words for intelligence and in 耳聪目明, meaning “sharp of hearing and sight,” or mentally alert.
An older precursor is 悤. Its early bone-and-shell inscription forms are hard to interpret; inscriptions on bronze objects use it for intelligence. One traditional explanation reads 心 (“heart, mind”) with an open shape as an image of an open mind. The later traditional form 聰 adds 耳 (“ear”), linking the character to keen hearing; 聪 is the simplified form of 聰.
Usually positive when it praises intelligence; in 自作聪明, it criticizes someone for acting overconfidently.
In 自作聪明, the phrase criticizes overconfidence.
Don't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 聪 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 聪
聪\806ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.