Chinese character 鮻

Two fish names: a legendary sea creature and a mullet species.

In the Chinese classic The Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》), 鮻 names a strange sea fish with a human face and hands and a fish’s body; its appearance signals stormy seas.

In Chinese fishery naming, 鮻 is a Mandarin common name for the mullet Planiliza haematocheila, a fish associated with China. The name appears as 鮻鱼 in simplified Chinese and 鮻魚 in traditional Chinese; this is the mullet sense.

How did 鮻 enter the dictionaries?

The earliest listed record is in the Song-era Jiyun.

鮻 combines 魚, the fish component, with 夋, which helps cue its Mandarin reading. Mandarin Pinyin, the standard Latin-letter spelling system, writes it as suō; say it roughly like “suo” on a high, level tone.

A 2024 Chinese character-variant record lists the Song-era 《集韻》, a Chinese rhyme dictionary, as the earliest witness, glossing 鮻 simply as “fish name.” That record does not list it as a headword in 《說文解字》, an early Chinese character dictionary; later dictionary tradition links it to the creature in 《山海经》.

What if someone sends 鮻 alone?

Treat it as a fish name, not a reaction.

The documented senses are fish names: a classical sea creature or a mullet species. Read a lone 鮻 as literal Chinese text until its surrounding sentence gives you a reason to read it otherwise.