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Someone asked me for help with this character. I could not write it down on my keyboard with handwriting, so I looked through my dictionary the old fashioned way for it (Pleco).

enter image description here

I looked at every single entry for the radical 心, and did not see it. I also did not see anything similar enough to be a recognizable typo (everything I saw would have required at least two of the four radicals to be wrong). I even looked through the unicode characters in Pleco with no definition, no luck.

There is always the chance that it is grossly miswritten, but it looks like it could be a perfectly correct character. So of all the remaining possibilities I considered, I find it most likely to be one of the characters that never made it into the 20,000+ unicode characters.

I think it would be possible to check in one of the much bigger pre computer age dictionaries, but have no way to get a hold of one here in the USA.

Does someone have access to such a dictionary, or recognize the character?

Does anyone have an alternate way to find it, or look up such non unicode characters?

Becky 李蓓
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zagrycha
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  • As far as I can tell, it is not encoded. Similar characters do exist but they are not the same. – dROOOze Nov 25 '22 at 07:47
  • @dROOOze good to confirm that it is indeed a non-unicode character. Any idea a way to check the meaning/what the regular version is? I checked your two links but did not see that info. (maybe I missed it I haven't used either before.) – zagrycha Nov 25 '22 at 08:40
  • I forgot to mention - you should not be using radicals to check characters (that's very inefficient). Try http://www.guoxuedashi.net/zidian/bujian/ which is how I found those entries. – dROOOze Nov 29 '22 at 09:25

2 Answers2

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Surely, that's a variant of 愆 (U+6106)/ (U+2039D) 'fault, mistake, error, transgression'. In fact, GlyphWiki records exactly the variant under question as 'cbeta-15523', CBETA being the digital archive of the Buddhist Canon, so this form has definitely been seen around somewhere in the Buddhist maniscripts.

Alexander Z.
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It’s shown here in this dictionary:

https://www.zdic.net/hant/

Geoffrey Chang
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