What 臘 means
It names a year-end rite, the twelfth lunar month, or cured meat.
Earliest attested form, from the Warring States period, combines 肉 (flesh) with sound component 巤; the rite offered hunted goods to gods and ancestors.
It later named the month and cured meat. A Han period silk text uses 臘 as a sound loan for 獵 (“hunting”). Japanese dictionaries list the rite and month senses as of 2026.
Traditional Chinese and historical; familiar in lunar-month and preserved-food compounds.
For Simplified Chinese, use 腊; 臘 is the Traditional Chinese form.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does 臘 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 臘
臘\81D8Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.