What 鬻 means
It means “to sell” or “peddle” in literary Chinese.
賣官鬻爵 means “selling offices and titles” and condemns trading rank for gain.
An early Chinese dictionary, 說文解字, defines 鬻 as rice gruel. It analyzes the character as 䰜, an ancient cooking-vessel component, plus 米 (“rice”) as a sound element. Japanese also preserves 鬻 in the archaic verb 鬻ぐ, read ひさぐ, meaning “to sell.”
Literary and old-fashioned in Chinese; compounds about selling office or family can sound condemnatory or desperate.
Alone, 鬻 gives little context; read the surrounding word.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does 鬻 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 鬻
鬻\9B3BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.