One hundred and seventy-two strokes. Pronounced huang. It takes three minutes to write once, and by the time you finish, your wrist aches.
It’s pieced together. A rain radical on top; three 田 and five 土 underneath; a dragon and a phoenix flying toward each other in the middle; then three 鹿 arranged like the character 品; two 山 and two 风 flanking the sides; and a 辶 wrapping around the outside. Someone came up with a little rhyme: “Rain falls on three fields, moistening five soils; dragon and phoenix rise as clouds swirl; three deer in the mountains, with wind for company; 辶 beneath it all, pronounced huang.”
There was a question on Zhihu saying this character had been included in the Zihai dictionary. More than a million people took a look.
To be honest, I can’t find which edition or page. It’s always been a folk-made compound character, used on Spring Festival couplets and red envelopes. It’s never had official status.
The debate below got pretty serious. One side said that if it’s included, it counts as a character; the other said that if it can’t be entered with an input method, it’s still just a drawing.
I’ve been thinking about it, and both sides are asking the wrong question. Whether something counts as a character has never been up to the dictionary. Dictionaries recognize characters after the fact; they don’t stamp them into existence.
What really has it by the throat is something else: whether you can type it.
The input box on your phone doesn’t have this glyph in its font. You could press all twenty-six letters and it still wouldn’t help. In the end, all you can do is take a photo, screenshot it, save it as an image, and send it. After the image gets passed around a couple of times, it blurs into a smear of ink dots.
Look. One hundred and seventy-two strokes. Not a single code point. That’s probably where it gets stuck.
I looked into Unicode’s process. For a character to get in, someone has to write a proposal, there has to be a genuine need to use it, and then it has to wait its turn at a meeting. The character 龘 has forty-eight strokes, and it got in. Biang has fifty-six strokes; people in Shaanxi have been eating those noodles for years, and it’s still left standing outside. That’s where it gets stuck.
On-chain, it’s the other way around. An inscription doesn’t ask whether anyone has ever used the thing, or where it came from. Pay a fee, and the bytes lie there forever: anyone can find them, and no one can delete them.
The two kinds of “existence” come at very different prices. One requires approval; the other, payment. One means waiting in line; the other, swiping your card.
So does a character you can’t type count as having ever existed?
You’ve seen characters in group chats that can only be sent as images, right? The person sending one may not be lazy. They have a shape in their hands, but no address for it.
I’ve thought this through. As we go forward, there’ll be more and more things taking that other route—not necessarily because the blockchain is better, but mainly because it’s cheap and doesn’t have to wait for anyone’s approval.
No one can say who first wrote this character. It’s all been passed along by word of mouth. The versions circulating online range from 170 to 180 strokes. There’s no definitive answer as to which version is the real one.
$BTC $ORDI $SATS #汉字 #Unicode #inscription
It’s pieced together. A rain radical on top; three 田 and five 土 underneath; a dragon and a phoenix flying toward each other in the middle; then three 鹿 arranged like the character 品; two 山 and two 风 flanking the sides; and a 辶 wrapping around the outside. Someone came up with a little rhyme: “Rain falls on three fields, moistening five soils; dragon and phoenix rise as clouds swirl; three deer in the mountains, with wind for company; 辶 beneath it all, pronounced huang.”
There was a question on Zhihu saying this character had been included in the Zihai dictionary. More than a million people took a look.
To be honest, I can’t find which edition or page. It’s always been a folk-made compound character, used on Spring Festival couplets and red envelopes. It’s never had official status.
The debate below got pretty serious. One side said that if it’s included, it counts as a character; the other said that if it can’t be entered with an input method, it’s still just a drawing.
I’ve been thinking about it, and both sides are asking the wrong question. Whether something counts as a character has never been up to the dictionary. Dictionaries recognize characters after the fact; they don’t stamp them into existence.
What really has it by the throat is something else: whether you can type it.
The input box on your phone doesn’t have this glyph in its font. You could press all twenty-six letters and it still wouldn’t help. In the end, all you can do is take a photo, screenshot it, save it as an image, and send it. After the image gets passed around a couple of times, it blurs into a smear of ink dots.
Look. One hundred and seventy-two strokes. Not a single code point. That’s probably where it gets stuck.
I looked into Unicode’s process. For a character to get in, someone has to write a proposal, there has to be a genuine need to use it, and then it has to wait its turn at a meeting. The character 龘 has forty-eight strokes, and it got in. Biang has fifty-six strokes; people in Shaanxi have been eating those noodles for years, and it’s still left standing outside. That’s where it gets stuck.
On-chain, it’s the other way around. An inscription doesn’t ask whether anyone has ever used the thing, or where it came from. Pay a fee, and the bytes lie there forever: anyone can find them, and no one can delete them.
The two kinds of “existence” come at very different prices. One requires approval; the other, payment. One means waiting in line; the other, swiping your card.
So does a character you can’t type count as having ever existed?
You’ve seen characters in group chats that can only be sent as images, right? The person sending one may not be lazy. They have a shape in their hands, but no address for it.
I’ve thought this through. As we go forward, there’ll be more and more things taking that other route—not necessarily because the blockchain is better, but mainly because it’s cheap and doesn’t have to wait for anyone’s approval.
No one can say who first wrote this character. It’s all been passed along by word of mouth. The versions circulating online range from 170 to 180 strokes. There’s no definitive answer as to which version is the real one.
$BTC $ORDI $SATS #汉字 #Unicode #inscription