U+85AA "薪" CJK Unified Ideograph-# Unicode Character
U+85AA "薪" CJK Unified Ideograph-# is a Chinese character that primarily means "firewood" or "fuel," but it also carries the extended meanings of "salary" or "wages" in modern usage, as seen in compounds like "薪水" (xīnshuǐ). This character combines the radical for grass or plant (艹) with a phonetic component, reflecting its original reference to plant material used for burning. In classical texts, it often appears in the context of gathering wood for cooking or heating, while in contemporary East Asian languages, it has metaphorically shifted to denote the financial fuel for one's livelihood. Its stroke count is sixteen, and it belongs to the set of radically consistent Han characters shared across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, where it is used in formal and everyday written communication.