What 肺 means
It means “lung,” plus literary “heart.”
The left side marks flesh, the right side 巿 gives the sound. Old medicine groups it with 肝, 心, 脾 and 腎. 肺腑之言 (“words from the lungs”) and Japanese 肺腑 keep the sincere-heart extension. As of 2026-09-07, dictionaries trace it to a small-seal form without a secure oracle-bone ancestor.
A lone 肺 reads as a clipped health label, not a full thought. Pair it: add 炎 for illness, 部 for anatomy, or copy 肺腑之言 for sincerity.
Technical alone; literary in inner-feeling idioms.
A bare 肺 looks clipped, not caring.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does 肺 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 肺
肺\80BACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.