What 臿 means
It names grain work, a digging tool, and interspersing.
Shuowen Jiezi, a Han-era Chinese character dictionary, defines 臿 as pounding wheat to remove its husk. The San Shi Pan, a late Western Zhou bronze vessel, bears an inscription with an early form of 臿; the text records a land-boundary agreement between two states. This attests to the character by then, not its invention date.
Classical texts also use 臿 for a digging spade and as a verb meaning to intersperse or insert.
Questions people ask
1Why does 臿 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 臿
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 81FF, then Alt+X to get 臿.
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-81ff”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 81ff, then Enter or Space.
HTML
臿CSS
\81FFCodes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
臿
HTML hex
臿
CSS content
content: "\81FF";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E8%87%BF
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.