What 釅 means
It means thick, strong, or intense in taste. The earliest explicit definition located is in the Longkan dictionary, where it describes the thick taste of wine and vinegar. The 2024 Taiwan Ministry of Education entry says 釅 is not recorded in Shuowen. Its job is practical: naming sensory strength in fermented drinks.
A poem from the Tang period uses 釅 for deep color. Song and later periods show it with wine, tea, vinegar, and dark color; Taiwanese reference material gives the same strong-tea reading. The sense travels from drink intensity to depth of color, while the character stays a word rather than a signal.
How do I type 釅?
Use Mandarin pinyin yan4, then select 釅. Pinyin input returns several yàn candidates, so scan the list; Cangjie MWRRK jumps to it directly.
If your input method is set to simplified Chinese, search for 酽 or switch to traditional input: 酽 is the simplified counterpart of 釅. For a traditional-text quotation, copy 釅 from the palette so the script choice stays deliberate.
Why does 釅 appear as 酽?
酽 is the simplified form of the same word. The variant dictionary links 釅 to 醶 as a variant; nearby wine words include 醲 and 醇, both about rich or thick drink. These are script or lexical relationships, not free modern spellings.
Use 濃 for ordinary modern “thick” wording; choose 釅 when reading, quoting, or deliberately writing the traditional form.
Rare and literary; it describes concentrated flavor, not a chat reaction.
If you mean ordinary “thick,” 釅 can look deliberately archaic.
Don't confuse it with
4Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 釅 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 釅
釅\91C5Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.