Jiong

This article is about the emoticon. For the Xia king, see Jiong of Xia. For the Western Jin king, see Sima Jiong.
Jiong (囧) in Kaishu, Clerical, Seal, and Oracle bone scripts (top to bottom)

Jiong (Chinese: 囧; pinyin: jiǒng; Jyutping: gwing2) is a once obscure Chinese character meaning a "patterned window".[1] Since 2008, it has become an internet phenomenon and widely used to express embarrassment and gloom because of the character's resemblance to a sad facial expression.[2]

It has historically been used as a Chinese dictionary radical and has Shuowen Jiezi number 240, but it is not included among the Kangxi radicals, nor by the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components.

Original meanings

  1. Window, according to Xu Shen's 2nd-century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi: "窻牖麗廔闓明" ('an open and light window').
  2. Granary. 米囧 means "put the new rice into a granary".
  3. Sacrificial place. Based on Chouli.
  4. Toponym.

Internet emoticon

A stylised version of the 囧 emoticon

The character for jiong is nowadays more widely used on the Internet as an ideographic emoticon representing a range of moods, as it resembles a person's face. It is commonly used to express ideas or feelings such as annoyance, shock, embarrassment, awkwardness, etc.

The use of jiong as an emoticon can be traced to 2005 or earlier; it was referenced on 20 January 2005 in a Chinese-language article on Orz.[3] The character is sometimes used in conjunction with orz, OTZ, or its other variants to form "囧rz", representing a person on their hands and knees (jiong forming the face, while r and z represent arms and legs, respectively) and symbolising despair or failure.

Encoding

The character is included in Unicode at U+56E7 (囧).[4] Unicode also includes U+518F (冏), which is considered a variant.[5]

Character information
Preview 囧 冏
Unicode name CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-56E7 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-518F
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 22247 U+56E7 20879 U+518F
UTF-8 229 155 167 E5 9B A7 229 134 143 E5 86 8F
Numeric character reference 囧 囧 冏 冏
Shift JIS[6] 153 103 99 67
EUC-JP[7] 143 182 250 8F B6 FA 209 200 D1 C8
GBK / GB 18030[8] 135 229 87 E5 131 215 83 D7
KPS 9566-2011[9] 200 130 C8 82
Big5[10] 202 168 CA A8 202 106 CA 6A
EUC-TW[11][12] 142 162 163 200 8E A2 A3 C8 142 162 163 172 8E A2 A3 AC
CCCII / EACC[4][13][14] 33 115 119 21 73 77 33 105 110 21 69 6E
Kangxi Dictionary reference[15][16] Page 217, character 10 Page 129, character 12

References

  1. ^ Li & Li 2014, pp. 252–3.
  2. ^ Hammond & Richey 2014, p. 141.
  3. ^ "心情很orz嗎？ 網路象形文字幽默一下". NOWnews.com. Archived from the original on 2012-11-15. Retrieved 2013-03-14.
  4. ^ a b "Unihan data for U+56E7". Unicode Consortium.
  5. ^ "Unihan data for U+56E7". Unicode Consortium. kKoreanName 2015:U+518F 冏
  6. ^ Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-03-08]. "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
  7. ^ Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
  8. ^ Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (2005-11-18). GB 18030-2005: Information Technology—Chinese coded character set.
  9. ^ Chung, Jaemin (2018-01-05). "Information on the most recent version of KPS 9566 (KPS 9566-2011?)" (PDF). UTC L2/18-011.
  10. ^ van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
  11. ^ "[囧] 2-2348". CNS 11643 Word Information. National Development Council.
  12. ^ "[冏] 2-232C". CNS 11643 Word Information. National Development Council.
  13. ^ "Unihan data for U+518F". Unicode Consortium.
  14. ^ "EACC to Unicode". Library of Congress.
  15. ^ "Page 217". Kangxi Dictionary.
  16. ^ "Page 129". Kangxi Dictionary.

Bibliography