What 飲 means
It means drinking; language sets its reading. Chinese uses it for drinking liquids; in literary Japanese, 飲泣 means “to weep silently.”
Oracle-bone forms of 飲 appear in inscriptions—writing on animal bones and shells—from late Shang, about 1300–1050 BCE. They show a person drinking wine from a vessel. On bronze vessels, the person shape was reinterpreted as 欠 and the mouth shape as 今, forming 㱃; its left element later became 食 in 飲.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
1A word for drinking alcohol; 飲 alone is broader.
Questions people ask
1Why does 飲 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 飲
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 98F2, then Alt+X to get 飲.
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-98f2”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 98f2, then Enter or Space.
HTML
飲CSS
\98F2Traditional Chinese
To type 飲 with Pinyin, enter yin in a Mandarin Pinyin input method set to traditional characters.
Japanese
To type 飲 in Japanese, enter nomu in a Japanese input method and select 飲む; compounds may use in (いん).
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
飲
HTML hex
飲
CSS content
content: "\98F2";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E9%A3%B2
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.