U+55F3 "嗳" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character

U+55F3 "嗳" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character (hanzi) that primarily functions as an interjection or exclamation in modern Mandarin, often used to express surprise, mild protest, or to draw someone's attention, similar to "hey" or "ah" in English. Historically, it also conveys meanings related to sighing or expressing a tone of inquiry, and it appears in classical texts and compounds, though its modern usage is largely restricted to spoken or informal written contexts. The character is composed of the "mouth" radical on the left, indicating speech or sound, and the phonetic component on the right, which provides a clue to its pronunciation as "ai" or "ai3" in Mandarin, with variant readings depending on context.