What 酯 means
It names esters, a class of organic compounds.
酯 appears in chemical and materials terms such as 聚酯 (“polyester”) and 乙酸乙酯 (“ethyl acetate”). Its left component 酉 marks an oxygen-containing chemical family; the right component 旨 supplies the sound.
How did 酯 become a chemistry term?
It was coined for modern Chinese chemistry terminology.
Chinese translations of imported chemistry competed, and a stable class name was needed. 酯 was proposed in 1931 and standardized through 1932–33 nomenclature work.
Its form was modeled on 脂 (“lipid”) because glycerides, a kind of fat, contain ester bonds. Japanese technical writing usually uses the katakana term エステル instead of 酯.
Technical chemistry and materials vocabulary; in ordinary Chinese prose, it reads as specialist terminology.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does 酯 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 酯
酯\916FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.