What 镰 means
It means a hand sickle for cutting crops.
The Han-era 《说文解字》, an early Chinese dictionary, records 鎌 as a cutting tool. A Han-dynasty harvest scene distinguishes a hand sickle for grain heads from a handled 钹镰 for stalks. Chinese dictionaries also use 镰 for a sharp edge, as in 镰利 (“sharp-edged”).
Why do I see 鐮 or 鎌?
They are related forms used in different languages.
Simplified Chinese uses 镰; traditional Chinese, 鐮; Japanese, 鎌. These are distinct characters. Fonts for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can give other shared Han characters regional glyphs.
Questions people ask
1Why does 镰 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 镰
镰\9570Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.