What ⽡ means
It marks the tile component in radical-and-stroke lookup.
瓦's recognizable written form is first attested in Warring States writing, and its meaning expanded from fired pottery to roof tiles. The Shuowen Jiezi dictionary grouped characters into sections; the eighteenth-century Kangxi dictionary built on that approach, sorting entries by radical and remaining strokes. Unicode treats ⽡ as the radical sign and 瓦 as its corresponding full character.
Technical: a dictionary-indexing sign, not ordinary writing.
In running text, use 瓦; ⽡ is the separate radical sign.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ⽡ 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 ⽡
⽡\2F61Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.