What 钨 means
It means tungsten; its older form also appears in a vessel term.
Two older Chinese character dictionaries, 玉篇 and 廣韻, record 鎢錥, a small warming vessel; this sense predates the chemical meaning.
The naming origins branch: English tungsten reflects Swedish tung sten (“heavy stone”); German Wolfram and the chemical symbol W connect to wolframite, a tungsten-bearing mineral. In modern Chinese, 金/钅 marks the metal, while 烏/乌 hints at the sound.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does 钨 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 钨
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 94A8, then Alt+X to get 钨.
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-94a8”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 94a8, then Enter or Space.
HTML
钨CSS
\94A8How to type 钨
In a Mandarin Pinyin keyboard (Mandarin written in Latin letters), type wu and choose 钨; wū is the same syllable marked with its first tone.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
钨
HTML hex
钨
CSS content
content: "\94A8";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E9%92%A8
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.