What ⿔ means
It marks the turtle radical, a dictionary filing component.
In a radical-and-stroke index, characters are grouped by a component (the radical), then ordered by the strokes left over. ⿔ names that filing group; it is not the ordinary character for writing the animal’s name.
Why does ⿔ look like 龜?
The radical sign and turtle ideograph have different jobs.
An early turtle character survives in an oracle-bone inscription—writing carved on a tortoise shell used for divination—from the Late Shang period. Oracle-bone turtle characters depicted the animal in profile or from above; ⿔ is a later indexing sign based on the turtle ideograph.
The Kangxi Character Dictionary, completed in 1716, arranged entries under 214 radicals, then by remaining strokes. Japanese kanji dictionaries later adopted this format. Unicode encodes ⿔ separately from the ideograph 龜, so an index can label the radical without using the animal word.
What if someone sends ⿔ alone?
Read it as a dictionary reference first.
If someone sends ⿔ alone, ask what dictionary entry, character, or font they mean. Its indexing role is the safest clue before assigning it a personal meaning.
Technical and lexicographic: it names a dictionary filing component, not the turtle word used in ordinary text.
Use ⿔ as the index marker; write the ordinary turtle character in running text.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
3
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does ⿔ show as a box?
A box means the current font or its fallback fonts cannot render this character. Choose a font that supports the Kangxi Radicals block.
More like this
11
How to type or find ⿔
- Search it as
- turtle radical · radical 213 · 龜 radical · 龟 radical · 亀 radical · ⿔ Unicode
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⿔\2FD4Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.