<p>(sorry to toot my own horn, but my prior effort to Edit another answer to give credit didn't work)  </p>

<hr>

<p>The question makes sense, but is not quite correct.<br>
It says  </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>the dictionary is only contemporary Chinese, not for multiple uses for
  Hanzi.</p>
</blockquote>

<p><strong>But</strong> if you're looking at   </p>

<ul>
<li>Unihan</li>
</ul>

<p><strong><em>that very much is an abstract Hanzi reference.</em></strong>  </p>

<p>It is not only for contemporary Chinese -  not even only for Chinese language.<br>
Here is the Wikipedia on it:  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification</a>  </p>

<p>If it is shown inside your electronic Mandarin or Cantonese or other Chinese dictionary,  you should expect some confusion.<br>
It's a huge set of characters.<br>
There may be genuine disagreement on a "correct" mapping, as well as mistakes or compromises in your electronic tool.<br>
~<br>
~<br>
For a specific Component or Character mapping you are curious about, maybe that should be a new question. </p>

<p>As for the definition "kwukyel"...<br>
as a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you.<br>
That definition is for an old form of Korean writing - also considered in Unihan.  It was a mark just to guide the reader, without a "meaning" of it's own.  </p>

<p>As a learner of Chinese, if you see "kwukyel" in Unihan you should think </p>

<ol>
<li>if there is another definition in your tool, from a Chinese-only dictionary, you should use that because it was (hopefully) researched just for Chinese --  ignore the Unihan</li>
<li>if there is no other definition, just take it as "no useful meaning" </li>
</ol>

<p>If you think your electronic dictionary could be improved, you might report to their support.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-10T06:06:33.717Z
2016-01-13T03:58:29.803Z
2016-01-13T03:58:29.803Z
Mike M
<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kwukyel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kwukyel</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugyeol" rel="nofollow noreferrer">gugyeol</a> is a Korean system to write Chinese characters phonetically that predates Hangul. As for <code>丷</code> itself, to quote from <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%B7#Korean" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wiktionary</a>: </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>This is a kwukyel note. Kwukyel was a system formerly used in Korea whereby correct interpretation of texts written in Classical Chinese was aided by small interspersed notes such as this one. The notes represent Korean morphemes but were only used within Chinese text.</p>
</blockquote>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T13:45:00.410Z
Yeah,  I did see that by searching online....     I'm trying to learn what it means to me as a Chinese learner.

Why is this definition used for Chinese characters?
I'm not looking at a Korean dictionary.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T13:48:07.353Z
So maybe to help get this more on track...   this may well be a question about the "Unihan" dictionary inside Pleco...  is it functionally wrong in this case, since I'm interested in modern Chinese?   If so, I'd like to find that out with some evidence.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T13:53:19.517Z
Well the dictionary is saying that it is not a meaningful character. The definition in a Chinese-Chinese dictionary here: http://www.zdic.net/z/15/js/4E37.htm indicates that it's pretty much only used as a 偏旁.
Ringil
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T02:08:19.900Z
I improved my question to be more explicit about "Chinese language".  I really appreciate your link to the other dictionary.  For me that just doubles-down on the question, though.  Why is this mapping in a Chinese dictionary..... is the mapping wrong?   I'd like to get through that part of this here, and I don't think we're there yet.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T14:45:19.137Z
I think the mapping is wrong AND it's a meaningless character. The correct English definition would look like `A kwukyel symbol made from  a Chinese character component. (unused)` But plenty of English dictionaries have junk information in them as well. For example, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/yu defines `yu` as the person Yu the Great, but that isn't how English speakers would see Yu, which I'm pretty sure people would consider a surname. Regardless, this word shouldn't even exist in an English dictionary and the definition is garbage as well. `丷` is similar in a CE dictionary.
Ringil
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T10:02:04.057Z
2017-07-29T09:12:33.593Z
2017-07-29T09:12:33.593Z
Ringil
<p>As a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you. But since Chinese characters were and are used to write other languages, diacritics used in 口訣 (kwukyel/gugyeol) belong to the Hanzi (in Unihan just "Han") world. So if Pleco uses the Unihan database as its source, kwukyel signs are bound to appear.</p>

<p>Also, regarding the added question of what to name them in Chinese, the name <em>kwukyel</em> maps to 口訣. Hence calling them just that, [Hánguó] kǒujué, 韓國口訣, could work.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-06T07:28:38.563Z
This sounds a lot more like what I'm asking.
At least half of it :-).

So are you saying that the "Unihan" reference is intended for many uses, potentially outside encoding modern Chinese?

That could explain the inclusion of "kwukyel" as a definition.   
But then is there a better definition that I should substitute for Chinese?
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-06T08:06:39.530Z
Unihan is for CJK. That's why your question is, I think, flawed: the title mentions "Chinese Characters", but the body of the questions says "Chinese". It is wrong to equate Chinese Characters and Chinese language. Per the UniHan page: "The Unihan database is the repository for the Unicode Consortium’s collective knowledge regarding the CJK Unified Ideographs contained in the Unicode Standard. It contains mapping data to allow conversion to and from other coded character sets and additional information to help implement support for the various languages which use the Han ideographic script."
dda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T01:29:17.113Z
Great.  So I think I understand Unihan better now.   Thank you @dda.   But I don't feel a need to throw out the question.  These "kwukyel" are being treated as character Components in at least 2 Chinese dictionaries.  If they aren't "kwukyel" in Chinese language, what are they?
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T01:30:57.867Z
Or maybe that's a new question...   I'm thinking about that :-)
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T01:56:57.583Z
I decided "no",  it's not a new question.  I see the confusion of "Chinese Language" versus "all Hanzi".  But I definitely intended to ask about "Chinese Language"...   I edited the question to say "language" very explicitly.   If you can provide some references that say the marks really have no meaning, I can give you credit for the answer!    ( and then I will ask a new question about the dictionaries being wrong )
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T02:16:55.013Z
You cannot prove a negative. 口訣 is a Korean-only thing, and is in the Unihan because it was (A) based on Chinese characters, and (B) used in conjunction with "regular" Chinese characters to write sounds specifics to Korean, like 乫 /kal/. They **are** 漢子, just not ones used in Mandarin. The same way 冇嘢唔 are 漢子, used in Cantonese and Hakka, and not in any other version of Chinese.
dda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T02:20:13.840Z
And as for the dictionaries being wrong, they are **not**. 口訣 characters are Chinese characters, and whether they are used in Chinese or not is irrelevant. For instance 乫 is in ZDIC, acknowledged as a Korean-only character (and has a Mandarin pronunciation, jia1): http://www.zdic.net/z/15/js/4E6B.htm
dda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T02:29:40.483Z
Ok.  Thanks for your feedback.  I guess we just agree to disagree on what is the use of the dictionaries we're looking at.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-07T07:27:04.647Z
For what it's worth, dictionaries using the Unihan database do not look too much into what's in it before making its contents available to the user. If a character is in the CJK range, it will show up and will be searchable.
dda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-09T05:10:47.170Z
*If they aren't "kwukyel" in Chinese language, what are they?* They are 漢子 that are not in use in Mandarin Chinese.
dda
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-09T08:37:13.167Z
cool.  I had also edited your answer (kindof a lot) to get a bunch of this information in there, so then I could Accept it and close this, but maybe it got rejected.  I really wasn't clear about Unihan and did my own research.  I put that basic info in there as a big part of clarifying things for me.  Unihan absolutely __is__ an abstract Hanzi reference, and an ongoing, imperfect project.  That explains a lot for me.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T15:13:41.777Z
2016-01-09T05:14:47.513Z
2016-01-09T05:14:47.513Z
dda
<p>Specifically for the character "兑", the top two strokes are a corrupted form of 八 , which in this case symbolizes air coming out of one's mouth.  The character "兑" is an early form of "悅", which means happiness.</p>

<p>Most characters can be classified as Pictographs (象形), Ideograms (指事), Compound-ideograph (會意) or Phono-semantic (形聲). By definition, compound-ideographs are composed by adding two different components to directly infer their meaning.  For an example, 林, composed of two 木, which means a forest. </p>

<p>So, attempting to understand Chinese by decomposing them into their respective parts only makes sense for compound-ideograph characters. Unfortunately, compound ideograph characters are only a fraction of the frequent Chinese characters in use.  ("兑" is, unfortunately, a pictograph)</p>

<p>Furthermore, many commonly-used Chinese characters take forms and meanings that are many degrees removed from their etymology. Normal people don't learn how to speak and write daily English by learning Latin and Germanic roots, so learning the etymology of Chinese characters would likely be overkill for mastering proficient use of the modern language. </p>

<hr>

<p>FYI, simply for the sake of correctness, many online sources claiming to explain Chinese character etymology is unreliable and rooted in folk etymology to propagate certain beliefs or religion, such as confucious beliefs or falun gong.  For example, many such websites would explain the character "王" by quoting the Confucious saying "a ruler is the person who can connect the heaven, the people and the ground" (一貫三為王).</p>

<p>However, oracle carvings from ~1500BC indicate that "王" is a pictograph for an axe.  Confucious is from ~500BC.  Chinese characters are far from as "deep" as some propagandish websites would lead you to believe.</p>

<p>But, most native users wouldn't care about the etymology anyway.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-12T16:58:10.973Z
-- To quote from 說文解字: 兑：从口从八象气之分 which means composed of a mouth and a "八" which looks like air going in separate directions.
Henry Chan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-13T03:15:02.913Z
Yeah, that's a good point.  My other dictionaries-inside-my-dictionary (Pleco)  do point it to 八.    For me, the confusing part is why the divergence...   that's why the answer  ( mine,  sorry :/ )  about the meaning and complications of Unihan is most relevant.  My next step is learning more about Simplified and how much that is the cause of "kwukyel"...  I might be bringing that back as a next question after I learn more.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-12T16:55:15.400Z
2016-01-12T17:14:29.940Z
2016-01-12T17:14:29.940Z
Henry Chan
<p>FWIW - when Unihan was first developed and Chinese characters were encoded, it's possible that someone attempted to resolve the components for characters such as "不” and mistakenly tried to decompose 不 into a compound ideograph when perhaps it should have been a single component plus misc strokes.</p>

<p>Perhaps creating a CJK character set itself is rife with built-in inconsistencies. </p>

<p>So, @mikem, you might consider "kwukyel" entries as residual errors that should be corrected in the dictionaries you're using. I believe mdbg has dropped references to kwukyel.</p>

<p>I'm creating my own database of Chinese-only characters and I'm treating kwukyel as simply additonal strokes.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-10T10:47:55.890Z
yes, it's part of the system.  I talked about it a bit in my answer below.  (got downvotes by folks I didn't accept, I imagine).  It was always intended as a cross-language reference, so it's up to the applications using it - or else the users - to interpret it correctly for the language you are interested in.  I didn't dig further to find out if kwukyel is wrongly mapped or just lacks a useful meaning for Chinese and perhaps shouldn't be mapped in my app.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-05T17:19:56.723Z
2018-05-05T17:19:56.723Z
IMTanuki
<p>My Pleco always tells me two little hashes on the top of 汉字 such as. </p>

<p>兑</p>

<p>are "kwukyel".  </p>

<p>Can anyone point me to a reference that explains this term as it relates to Chinese language?</p>

<hr>

<p>ps --  I already know the explanation about older Korean. That is not the question.  </p>

<p>I'm asking about why this is in my Chinese language dictionaries (at least two).   </p>

<p>[ <em>-- this premise is not quite correct ----</em><br>
 I don't believe these dictionaries are intended to be abstract Hanzi references.] </p>

<p>They are Chinese language dictionaries.  </p>

<ul>
<li>Is there any good reference that explains the mapping to "kwukyel"
for Chinese language is wrong?  </li>
<li><strong>If the term "kwukyel" is not meaningful for Chinese language, what definition should the marks be mapped to?</strong>

<ul>
<li><strong>If the answer is "nothing", please provide some evidence/references so I can give credit to your answer. :-)</strong></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T13:13:09.043Z
In linguistic terms, it's and interesting Korean thing, but as a learner of Chinese you can just ignore it.
imrek
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T13:46:22.087Z
That's the short answer I'm seeing for myself, but I'm trying to understand it.   If it is true that it is irrelevant,  I'm wondering if it's essentially an error in my electronic dictionary.
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-04T15:30:30.493Z
The answer by @dda explains the reason: Unihan database, or even CC-CEDICT has it, and Pleco relies on these sources, so that's why "kwukyel" is included in the app. There is no practical reason to have this in a Chinese-English dictionary, however.
imrek
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-06T07:30:09.433Z
@DrunkenMaster - yes, that is a helpful answer.  But maybe there is still the second half of the answer......   is there a better definition that I should substitute for Chinese?   It's hard to believe there wouldn't be :)
Mike M
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-12T17:18:00.033Z
the top two strokes of 兑 is not a separate character.
Henry Chan
<characters>
What does "kwukyel" mean in regards to Chinese language characters?
# What does "kwukyel" mean in regards to Chinese language characters?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2016-01-04)

My Pleco always tells me two little hashes on the top of 汉字 such as.

兑

are "kwukyel".

Can anyone point me to a reference that explains this term as it relates to Chinese language?

---

ps -- I already know the explanation about older Korean. That is not the question.

I'm asking about why this is in my Chinese language dictionaries (at least two).

[ *-- this premise is not quite correct ----*  
I don't believe these dictionaries are intended to be abstract Hanzi references.]

They are Chinese language dictionaries.

* Is there any good reference that explains the mapping to "kwukyel"
  for Chinese language is wrong?
* **If the term "kwukyel" is not meaningful for Chinese language, what definition should the marks be mapped to?**
  + **If the answer is "nothing", please provide some evidence/references so I can give credit to your answer. :-)**

**Tags:** characters
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: In linguistic terms, it's and interesting Korean thing, but as a learner of Chinese you can just ignore it.  
> **username_0**: That's the short answer I'm seeing for myself, but I'm trying to understand it.   If it is true that it is irrelevant,  I'm wondering if it's essentially an error in my electronic dictionary.  
> **username_1**: The answer by @dda explains the reason: Unihan database, or even CC-CEDICT has it, and Pleco relies on these sources, so that's why "kwukyel" is included in the app. There is no practical reason to have this in a Chinese-English dictionary, however.  
> **username_0**: @DrunkenMaster - yes, that is a helpful answer.  But maybe there is still the second half of the answer......   is there a better definition that I should substitute for Chinese?   It's hard to believe there wouldn't be :)  
> **username_2**: the top two strokes of 兑 is not a separate character.  

---

## 5 answers

### Answer by username_0 on 2016-01-10. Score: -2 | Accepted answer

(sorry to toot my own horn, but my prior effort to Edit another answer to give credit didn't work)

---

The question makes sense, but is not quite correct.  
It says

> the dictionary is only contemporary Chinese, not for multiple uses for
> Hanzi.

**But** if you're looking at

* Unihan

***that very much is an abstract Hanzi reference.***

It is not only for contemporary Chinese - not even only for Chinese language.  
Here is the Wikipedia on it: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification>

If it is shown inside your electronic Mandarin or Cantonese or other Chinese dictionary, you should expect some confusion.  
It's a huge set of characters.  
There may be genuine disagreement on a "correct" mapping, as well as mistakes or compromises in your electronic tool.  
~  
~  
For a specific Component or Character mapping you are curious about, maybe that should be a new question.

As for the definition "kwukyel"...  
as a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you.  
That definition is for an old form of Korean writing - also considered in Unihan. It was a mark just to guide the reader, without a "meaning" of it's own.

As a learner of Chinese, if you see "kwukyel" in Unihan you should think

1. if there is another definition in your tool, from a Chinese-only dictionary, you should use that because it was (hopefully) researched just for Chinese -- ignore the Unihan
2. if there is no other definition, just take it as "no useful meaning"

If you think your electronic dictionary could be improved, you might report to their support.


---

### Answer by username_3 on 2016-01-04. Score: 6

[kwukyel](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kwukyel) or [gugyeol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugyeol) is a Korean system to write Chinese characters phonetically that predates Hangul. As for `丷` itself, to quote from [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%B7#Korean):

> This is a kwukyel note. Kwukyel was a system formerly used in Korea whereby correct interpretation of texts written in Classical Chinese was aided by small interspersed notes such as this one. The notes represent Korean morphemes but were only used within Chinese text.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Yeah,  I did see that by searching online....     I'm trying to learn what it means to me as a Chinese learner.  Why is this definition used for Chinese characters? I'm not looking at a Korean dictionary.  
> **username_0**: So maybe to help get this more on track...   this may well be a question about the "Unihan" dictionary inside Pleco...  is it functionally wrong in this case, since I'm interested in modern Chinese?   If so, I'd like to find that out with some evidence.  
> **username_3**: Well the dictionary is saying that it is not a meaningful character. The definition in a Chinese-Chinese dictionary here: http://www.zdic.net/z/15/js/4E37.htm indicates that it's pretty much only used as a 偏旁.  
> **username_0**: I improved my question to be more explicit about "Chinese language".  I really appreciate your link to the other dictionary.  For me that just doubles-down on the question, though.  Why is this mapping in a Chinese dictionary..... is the mapping wrong?   I'd like to get through that part of this here, and I don't think we're there yet.  
> **username_3**: I think the mapping is wrong AND it's a meaningless character. The correct English definition would look like `A kwukyel symbol made from  a Chinese character component. (unused)` But plenty of English dictionaries have junk information in them as well. For example, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/yu defines `yu` as the person Yu the Great, but that isn't how English speakers would see Yu, which I'm pretty sure people would consider a surname. Regardless, this word shouldn't even exist in an English dictionary and the definition is garbage as well. `丷` is similar in a CE dictionary.  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2016-01-04. Score: 4

As a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you. But since Chinese characters were and are used to write other languages, diacritics used in 口訣 (kwukyel/gugyeol) belong to the Hanzi (in Unihan just "Han") world. So if Pleco uses the Unihan database as its source, kwukyel signs are bound to appear.

Also, regarding the added question of what to name them in Chinese, the name *kwukyel* maps to 口訣. Hence calling them just that, [Hánguó] kǒujué, 韓國口訣, could work.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: This sounds a lot more like what I'm asking. At least half of it :-).  So are you saying that the "Unihan" reference is intended for many uses, potentially outside encoding modern Chinese?  That could explain the inclusion of "kwukyel" as a definition.    But then is there a better definition that I should substitute for Chinese?  
> **username_4**: Unihan is for CJK. That's why your question is, I think, flawed: the title mentions "Chinese Characters", but the body of the questions says "Chinese". It is wrong to equate Chinese Characters and Chinese language. Per the UniHan page: "The Unihan database is the repository for the Unicode Consortium’s collective knowledge regarding the CJK Unified Ideographs contained in the Unicode Standard. It contains mapping data to allow conversion to and from other coded character sets and additional information to help implement support for the various languages which use the Han ideographic script."  
> **username_0**: Great.  So I think I understand Unihan better now.   Thank you @dda.   But I don't feel a need to throw out the question.  These "kwukyel" are being treated as character Components in at least 2 Chinese dictionaries.  If they aren't "kwukyel" in Chinese language, what are they?  
> **username_0**: Or maybe that's a new question...   I'm thinking about that :-)  
> **username_0**: I decided "no",  it's not a new question.  I see the confusion of "Chinese Language" versus "all Hanzi".  But I definitely intended to ask about "Chinese Language"...   I edited the question to say "language" very explicitly.   If you can provide some references that say the marks really have no meaning, I can give you credit for the answer!    ( and then I will ask a new question about the dictionaries being wrong )  
> **username_4**: You cannot prove a negative. 口訣 is a Korean-only thing, and is in the Unihan because it was (A) based on Chinese characters, and (B) used in conjunction with "regular" Chinese characters to write sounds specifics to Korean, like 乫 /kal/. They **are** 漢子, just not ones used in Mandarin. The same way 冇嘢唔 are 漢子, used in Cantonese and Hakka, and not in any other version of Chinese.  
> **username_4**: And as for the dictionaries being wrong, they are **not**. 口訣 characters are Chinese characters, and whether they are used in Chinese or not is irrelevant. For instance 乫 is in ZDIC, acknowledged as a Korean-only character (and has a Mandarin pronunciation, jia1): http://www.zdic.net/z/15/js/4E6B.htm  
> **username_0**: Ok.  Thanks for your feedback.  I guess we just agree to disagree on what is the use of the dictionaries we're looking at.  
> **username_4**: For what it's worth, dictionaries using the Unihan database do not look too much into what's in it before making its contents available to the user. If a character is in the CJK range, it will show up and will be searchable.  
> **username_4**: *If they aren't "kwukyel" in Chinese language, what are they?* They are 漢子 that are not in use in Mandarin Chinese.  
> **username_0**: cool.  I had also edited your answer (kindof a lot) to get a bunch of this information in there, so then I could Accept it and close this, but maybe it got rejected.  I really wasn't clear about Unihan and did my own research.  I put that basic info in there as a big part of clarifying things for me.  Unihan absolutely __is__ an abstract Hanzi reference, and an ongoing, imperfect project.  That explains a lot for me.  

---

### Answer by username_2 on 2016-01-12. Score: 2

Specifically for the character "兑", the top two strokes are a corrupted form of 八 , which in this case symbolizes air coming out of one's mouth. The character "兑" is an early form of "悅", which means happiness.

Most characters can be classified as Pictographs (象形), Ideograms (指事), Compound-ideograph (會意) or Phono-semantic (形聲). By definition, compound-ideographs are composed by adding two different components to directly infer their meaning. For an example, 林, composed of two 木, which means a forest.

So, attempting to understand Chinese by decomposing them into their respective parts only makes sense for compound-ideograph characters. Unfortunately, compound ideograph characters are only a fraction of the frequent Chinese characters in use. ("兑" is, unfortunately, a pictograph)

Furthermore, many commonly-used Chinese characters take forms and meanings that are many degrees removed from their etymology. Normal people don't learn how to speak and write daily English by learning Latin and Germanic roots, so learning the etymology of Chinese characters would likely be overkill for mastering proficient use of the modern language.

---

FYI, simply for the sake of correctness, many online sources claiming to explain Chinese character etymology is unreliable and rooted in folk etymology to propagate certain beliefs or religion, such as confucious beliefs or falun gong. For example, many such websites would explain the character "王" by quoting the Confucious saying "a ruler is the person who can connect the heaven, the people and the ground" (一貫三為王).

However, oracle carvings from ~1500BC indicate that "王" is a pictograph for an axe. Confucious is from ~500BC. Chinese characters are far from as "deep" as some propagandish websites would lead you to believe.

But, most native users wouldn't care about the etymology anyway.

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: -- To quote from 說文解字: 兑：从口从八象气之分 which means composed of a mouth and a "八" which looks like air going in separate directions.  
> **username_0**: Yeah, that's a good point.  My other dictionaries-inside-my-dictionary (Pleco)  do point it to 八.    For me, the confusing part is why the divergence...   that's why the answer  ( mine,  sorry :/ )  about the meaning and complications of Unihan is most relevant.  My next step is learning more about Simplified and how much that is the cause of "kwukyel"...  I might be bringing that back as a next question after I learn more.  

---

### Answer by username_5 on 2018-05-05. Score: 0

FWIW - when Unihan was first developed and Chinese characters were encoded, it's possible that someone attempted to resolve the components for characters such as "不” and mistakenly tried to decompose 不 into a compound ideograph when perhaps it should have been a single component plus misc strokes.

Perhaps creating a CJK character set itself is rife with built-in inconsistencies.

So, @mikem, you might consider "kwukyel" entries as residual errors that should be corrected in the dictionaries you're using. I believe mdbg has dropped references to kwukyel.

I'm creating my own database of Chinese-only characters and I'm treating kwukyel as simply additonal strokes.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: yes, it's part of the system.  I talked about it a bit in my answer below.  (got downvotes by folks I didn't accept, I imagine).  It was always intended as a cross-language reference, so it's up to the applications using it - or else the users - to interpret it correctly for the language you are interested in.  I didn't dig further to find out if kwukyel is wrongly mapped or just lacks a useful meaning for Chinese and perhaps shouldn't be mapped in my app.  

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