What ꎾ means
It writes one Liangshan Yi syllable: shurx. A Liangshan dictionary gives its sound as [ʂu̱³⁴], roughly a tongue-drawn-back “sh” followed by “oo”; the raised numbers mark tone.
The oldest reliably dated Yi script evidence is a bell inscription from the 15th century. Older regional forms served bimo—Yi ritual specialists—in religious, magical, medical, genealogical, and literary texts. The Liangshan standard was devised in 1974 and promulgated in 1980 for wider literacy, drawing on older Northern Yi forms. The bell dates known evidence, not the script’s beginning.
Font support determines how this Yi text glyph appears.
Is ꎾ an emoji? No; it is Yi text. Alone, it does not reveal which word or passage was meant; ask the sender.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ꎾ 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 ꎾ
ꎾ\A3BECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.