U+555E "啞" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+555E "啞" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character (hanzi) that traditionally means "mute" or "dumb," referring to the inability to speak, and it can also denote a hoarse or raspy voice in extended usage. Its composition includes the mouth radical (口) on the left, indicating speech or sound, and a phonetic component on the right that contributes to its pronunciation (typically read as yǎ in Mandarin). In classical texts, it sometimes appears in contexts describing speechlessness due to emotion or illness, and it is also used in compound words like 啞巴 (yǎba, meaning a mute person) or 啞劇 (yǎjù, meaning pantomime). This character is part of the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) unified ideographs block and is encoded for use across East Asian writing systems, carrying distinct but related meanings in all three languages.