What ⼳ means
No: ⼳ is the index sign; 幺 is the ordinary character.
The Unicode Standard maps ⼳ to 幺 as its ordinary-character counterpart, but keeps radical signs distinct from ideographs: use ⼳ in a radical index and 幺 in ordinary Chinese writing. The older character 幺 appears in oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions; later forms continue through seal, clerical, and regular scripts. The early Chinese character dictionary 说文解字 explains its shape as a child just born and gives it the sense «small». That is an old explanation of 幺, not the origin of the separate radical sign ⼳.
As of 2026, Chinese speakers use 幺 for «one» in phone numbers and other digit strings to avoid confusing it with 七. This spoken convention belongs to 幺, not ⼳.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
4
Questions people ask
1Why does ⼳ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Kangxi Radicals block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
11
How to type or find ⼳
- Search it as
- short thread radical · yao radical · 幺 · 幺部 · Kangxi radical 52 · ⼳
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⼳\2F33Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.