What 艰 means
It means difficult, arduous, or hard to deal with.
《说文解字》, an early Chinese character dictionary, glosses 艱 as soil hard to cultivate; its sense widened to difficulty. Early forms appear in inscriptions on oracle bones (shells and bones used for divination) and bronze vessels from the late Western Zhou, then in seal script, an old formal script. China's 1956 simplification scheme paired 艰 with traditional 艱.
Written and serious; a compound makes the hardship specific.
Alone, 艰 may feel clipped; 丁艱 belongs to a historical mourning context.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does 艰 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 艰
艰\8270Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.