⺼

⺼ (⺼, X2EBC) is a Unicode CJK radical .

This glyph represents the **Meat radical** used in many kanji related to body parts and flesh.

However, it can easily be confused with the glyph 月 (月, X6708) .

The confusion appears because both glyphs often look **identical in modern fonts**.

Warning: This article is under construction.

Confusion

Historically, the Meat radical derives from the character 肉.

When used as a component of another kanji, its shape was simplified and written as

⺼

This simplified form gradually became **visually indistinguishable from 月**.

As a result, modern printed kanji often replace the original meat radical with the same shape used for the moon glyph.

Even native Japanese readers usually cannot determine from the glyph alone whether a component represents

• ⺼ (meat radical)
• 月 (moon radical)

without knowing the etymology of the character.

This confusion is widely present in computer fonts and Unicode renderings.

Examples

Many characters related to the body contain the **meat radical** although they visually show 月.

Examples include:

脳 // brain 腕 // arm 肩 // shoulder 膝 // knee 肝 // liver

In these cases the component that looks like 月 historically corresponds to 肉 and therefore represents the **meat radical**.

Unicode situation

Unicode encodes the radical explicitly as

⺼ X2EBC

but most modern text uses characters where the radical appears only as a **component** inside a larger glyph.

Because of font design, the shapes

⺼ 月

may appear identical on many systems.

This makes automatic recognition of radicals difficult and may confuse students of Japanese and Chinese writing systems.

Use in technical language

Because of the ambiguity between

⺼ 月

these glyphs are excluded from the technical language Tarja.

Instead, explicit identifiers such as

X2EBC X6708

may be used when the precise character encoding must be specified.

See also

月 肉 KanjiRadical Confusion

Acknowledgement

The first version of this article is generated by ChatGPT.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_130 Radical 130 – meat radical derived from 肉.

https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/character.jsp?a=2EBC

Keywords

«Character», «CJK», «Confusion», «Glyph», «Japanese», «Kanji», «KanjiRadical», «Meat radical», «Unicode», «X2EBC» «⺼»,