What 鈾 means
Read it as a uranium term.
化學鑑原 gives the origin checked here. It belongs to the late-Qing effort to give imported elements one Chinese character: 金 classifies a metal and 由 suggests the pronunciation. Other translators tried longer transliterations and rival coined forms before 鈾 settled into traditional usage.
Technical and scientific; by itself, it reads like a chemistry term.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
3uranium enrichment
a uranium isotope
natural uranium
Questions people ask
1Why does 鈾 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 鈾
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 923E, then Alt+X to get 鈾.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “cjk unified ideograph-923e”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 923e, then Enter or Space.
HTML
鈾CSS
\923EPinyin or Cangjie
Type you and select 鈾; yóu is listed, with yòu also recorded. Cangjie is 金中田 (CLW).
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
鈾
HTML hex
鈾
CSS content
content: "\923E";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E9%88%BE
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.