What 顊 means
顊 is a listed variant of 頤: chin, cheek, jaw, or nourishment.
It is treated as an alternate spelling within the same Chinese word-family, so the surrounding text and source spelling matter. The Kangxi dictionary, a historical Chinese dictionary, quotes Han Feizi, a classical Chinese text, using 顊 for cheek in an injury scene. Other entries for 頤 include nourishing or maintaining, a hexagram—a figure used in divination—in the Yijing, the Chinese Book of Changes, a grammatical particle, and a surname.
What is known about its older form?
The related character family appears in much older writing.
An earlier graph, 𦣞, appears within the oracle-bone writing of 姬, another Chinese character, and in early bronze inscriptions. Oracle-bone writing was carved on animal bones and turtle shells. Scholars debate what the earliest shape depicts: a comb, a body part, or something else. Those traces belong to the related character family; they do not date the first appearance of this exact spelling, 顊.
A source-preserving variant found in Chinese dictionaries and historical-text contexts.
Alone, it does not show which sense of 頤 was intended; ask for the surrounding text.
Questions people ask
1Why does 顊 show as a square?
It can. The selected font may lack a glyph for 顊; a font that includes the character changes the display, not the text.
How to type 顊
顊\984ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.