What 죽 means
Usually a grain porridge when it stands alone. Early farming communities made meals by boiling ground grain; during Korea's Joseon period, porridge also served everyday, medicinal, famine, mourning, and ritual needs.
The older spelling 쥭 appears in texts from 1471 and 1475. A 1527 text also uses 쥭 for a rice or wooden scoop. After Korean lost its old tone distinctions, a suffix was added in the 17th century, producing modern 주걱, a rice scoop.
Neutral as food; stark in death-related words.
A bare 죽 is not automatically “die.”
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsCombination ideas
2Questions people ask
1Why does 죽 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 죽
죽\C8FDCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.