What ⼘ means
Search for “Kangxi Radical Divination” in a Unicode-aware character picker and select ⼘.
This is the Kangxi radical; ordinary 卜 is the related Han character. Unicode assigns them separate character identities despite their near-identical appearance.
What does ⼘ mean in historical writing?
It is the divination radical associated with reading cracks.
The recognisable ancestor of ⼘ appears in Shang oracle-bone writing. Diviners heated turtle shells or cattle shoulder blades and read the resulting cracks while asking about ancestors, a high god, or difficult decisions.
Later Chinese writing uses 卜 for divination more broadly and distinguishes it from 筮, a method that used yarrow stalks to produce a reading. Japanese kanji references also preserve 卜 in terms for fortune-telling and divination records.
A specialist indexing character tied to historical writing about divination.
For exact text, ⼘ and 卜 are distinct characters; substituting one changes the character identity.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does ⼘ 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
11
How to type or find ⼘
- Also called
- 卜 radical · radical 25
- Search it as
- 卜 · Kangxi radical · divination radical · oracle-bone divination · fortune-telling
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⼘\2F18Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.