What 锌 means
It names zinc in modern Chinese. In Mandarin, it sounds roughly like “sheen,” with a high, level tone. Terms such as 锌合金 (“zinc alloy”) and 镀锌 (“zinc-plated”) use it for the metal or its coatings.
Historical Chinese names for zinc included 白铅 and 倭铅; during the Ming period, zinc was used for brass and coinage. In 1871, Xu Shou and John Fryer introduced a system assigning one Chinese character to each chemical element, replacing longer labels with compact names such as 锌.
Technical and literal: in Chinese chemistry and materials writing, it names zinc.
In Japanese, write 亜鉛; 鋅 is not the usual spelling.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does 锌 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 锌
锌\950CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.