What 菰 means
菰 names a wetland plant, its grain, and its edible stem.
Chinese 菰 names the marsh plant. 菰米 refers to its grain; 菰菜 is an older name for 茭白, the edible swollen stem that forms after a fungus infects the plant. 苽 is the older written form recorded in the Eastern Han dictionary Shuowen Jiezi; 菰 is a later form with a sound component for the same sense.
Why can Japanese 菰 also mean a mat?
In Japanese, 菰 can name the plant or material woven from it.
菰樽 is a sake barrel wrapped in woven plant material. The wrapping protected sake casks in transport and later appears in 鏡開き, a celebration where a sake barrel is opened.
How do I type 菰?
Use Chinese pinyin gu or Japanese kana こも/まこも.
Fonts for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean may draw this character with different regional stroke designs; the shape can change without changing the character or its reading.
Alone, 菰 leaves its language and exact referent unclear; a compound usually resolves both.
Don’t translate 菰 directly as 茭白: 菰 can mean the plant; 茭白 names its swollen edible stem.
Who writes 菰
Loading…
What it means when someone sends it to you
4 readingsThe plant or a historical food term; surrounding words distinguish the sense.
Related characters
2
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 菰 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.
More like this
11
How to type or find 菰
- Also called
- gū · こも · まこも
- Search it as
- wetland plant · 菰米 · 菰菜 · 茭白 · 菰樽
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
菰\83F0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.