What 腳 means
It means “foot” or “leg,” and can name a thing’s lower end.
山腳 means a mountain’s foot; 桌腳, a table leg. Many varieties south of the Yangtze use 腳 for leg and foot together.
Mozi, a Chinese philosophical text from the Warring States era, uses 腳 for “leg.” The later Han-era dictionary Shuowen Jiezi narrows it to “shin,” below the knee, and analyzes it as 肉 (“flesh”) plus sound-marker 卻. Early forms appear on Qin bamboo slips and in clerical (official) and regular (standard) scripts.
Questions people ask
1Why does 腳 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 腳
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 8173, then Alt+X to get 腳.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “cjk unified ideograph-8173”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 8173, then Enter or Space.
HTML
腳CSS
\8173Traditional Chinese Cangjie
For shape-based Cangjie input, enter BCRL and select 腳 from the candidates.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
腳
HTML hex
腳
CSS content
content: "\8173";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E8%85%B3
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.