What 〬 means
It marks the historical Chinese departing tone.
Older editions of Chinese classics used this family of marks to flag unusual readings of Chinese characters. The four-tone framework also shaped rhyme dictionaries and poetic prosody.
Shen Yue’s Sìshēngpǔ, an account of four tones, dates to 441–513. The Qieyun, a Chinese rhyme dictionary dated 601, uses the system. In the Song dynasty, four-corner circle notation marked the departing category with a circle at the upper right of a character.
How do I type 〬?
Place it immediately after the Chinese character it annotates.
It is a combining mark, not a freestanding circle. In code, the Unicode escape \u302C inserts it after its base character.
The font positions it at the character’s corner, so a fallback font can make it look detached even when the text order is correct.
A specialist sign for historical pronunciation; it signals a tone category, not a conversational mood.
“Departing” is a tone name, not a farewell.
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Does 〬 have a sound of its own?
No. It has no syllable of its own; it records the historical tone category of the Chinese character it follows.
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How to type or find 〬
- Also called
- qùshēng mark · qusheng mark · 去声标志
- Search it as
- qusheng · qùshēng · 去声 · 去聲 · Chinese tone mark · pinyin · four-tone system · shōten
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
〬\302C\u302C immediately after the annotated Chinese character.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.