What 鞈 means
It names leather body armor and can describe hardness. The character refers to a leather chest guard. In the classical phrase 鞈如金石, it describes armor as hard as metal and stone.
The Han-period dictionary Shuowen Jiezi analyzes 鞈 as 革, meaning leather, plus 合, a component it treats as bearing the sound. The classical Chinese writings Guanzi and Xunzi use 鞈 for leather chest armor intended to help stop arrows.
Why does 鞈 have several readings?
Dictionaries connect different readings with different senses. The armor sense has two Mandarin readings. Another reading links 鞈 to 䶀, a character for a drum sound; a further reading links it to 靸, a word for a slipper. Dictionaries from mainland China and Taiwan do not list exactly the same readings, so a pinyin keyboard may show different candidates.
Classical and specialized: its recorded senses span armor, hardness, drum sound, and footwear.
Without a sentence, readers cannot tell whether 鞈 means armor, hardness, a drum sound, or footwear.
Questions people ask
1Why does 鞈 look different in different fonts?
Fonts for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean may draw 鞈 with different stroke styles. The font changes the drawing, not which character it is.
How to type 鞈
鞈\9788Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.