What 鰹 means
It names katsuo, the bonito fish.
The older spelling 堅魚 (“hard fish”) appears in the Kojiki, an early Japanese chronicle, in 712. Records from the Nara period describe dried bonito sent as tribute and used as a concentrated seasoning. The one-character spelling 鰹 appears by the early Heian period.
From the Sengoku period onward, wordplay connected katsuo with 勝つ (“to win”), making the fish auspicious. During the Edo period, 初鰹 named the season’s first catch.
A Japanese food word with a literal reading in isolation.
A lone 鰹 message names bonito; the old winning-fish wordplay needs context.
Who writes 鰹
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Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 鰹 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.
More like this
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How to type or find 鰹
- Search it as
- katsuo · かつお · カツオ · skipjack tuna · katsuobushi · 鰹節 · 初鰹
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
鰹\9C39Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.