What 跼 means
It means bend or crouch, then figuratively feel constrained.
The Shijing, an ancient Chinese poetry collection, pairs 局 beneath the high sky with 蹐 on thick earth: hunching and taking tiny steps. Later written forms use 跼 for the crouching graph, as in 跼天蹐地.
In Chinese, the posture extends metaphorically to restriction and unease. Japanese keeps a literal verb: 跼る, read せぐくまる, means to bend forward and round the back. A Japanese dictionary cites an example from the Nihon Shoki, an early Japanese chronicle dated 720.
Keep 跼 in literary forms and the Japanese verb
跼 is written with the foot component 足 before 局; 局 alone is a separate everyday character, including in words for an office or bureau. The forms share a historical crouching use, but are not freely interchangeable.
On its own, 跼 points most safely to a bent or crouched body. If someone sends it without a surrounding word, ask what compound it came from before choosing a figurative meaning.
Marked and literary in Chinese compounds; Japanese 跼る keeps the literal bent-back posture.
For a word meaning an office or bureau, use 局; 跼 is a specific crouching form, not decoration.
Who writes 跼
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Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 跼 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
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How to type or find 跼
- Also called
- kyoku · segukumaru
- Search it as
- ju · crouch · stoop · bend · 跼蹐 · 跼躅 · 跼天蹐地
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
跼\8DFCju and choose it from the candidates. Entering a known compound such as 跼蹐 narrows the list.きょく or せぐくまる in a Japanese IME, then select 跼; the latter is the verb reading.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.