What 鯔 means
It names a mullet, a fish.
The Jin-era Chinese text 神仙傳, an account of immortals, describes 鯔魚 as prized food. A 2024 entry from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education says 鯔 is absent from 說文, an early dictionary; later 廣韻 calls it a fish name.
In Japanese, 鯔背 (いなせ, inase) means dashing or spirited; tradition links it to young fish-market workers’ hairstyle in the Edo period.
A specialist fish name, at home in fish and food writing.
Bare 鯔 names a fish; the stylish sense belongs to 鯔背.
Combination ideas
2Chinese wording for the mullet fish.
Japanese いなせ (inase): dashing, spirited style.
Questions people ask
1Why does 鯔 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 鯔
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 9BD4, then Alt+X to get 鯔.
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-9bd4”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 9bd4, then Enter or Space.
HTML
鯔CSS
\9BD4Chinese / Japanese
With Chinese pinyin input (Latin-letter sound spelling) set to Traditional, enter `zi` and choose 鯔. In Japanese input, enter `ぼら` or `いな` and choose 鯔.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
鯔
HTML hex
鯔
CSS content
content: "\9BD4";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E9%AF%94
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.