I'm stumped! I have a character here in a text I'm trying to read that I can't find in the dictionary. It maybe that it's a peculiarly Cantonese character, as the word it appears in is the title of a Cantonese operatic song.

The character I'm looking for has (probably) 18 strokes and looks like a combination of 舀 on the left + 炎 on the right - it's definitely ONE character and not a sequence 舀炎 as the text I'm looking at is written in vertical columns so there cannot be two characters horizontally next to each other.

The full expression (song title) it appears in is "四廂情..." with the mystery character taking the place of the three dots.

Any ideas?

Chris from Berlin

yan4, means flame. It's an traditional chinese character.

Thanks Lisa! Doesn't seem to exist as a Unicode character, does it? Would like to *type* it as I'm cataloguing my little collection of Chinese vinyl records.

Or is it merely an ancient variant of 焰 ?

It is 燄. Just type "yan", you will find it. : )

Thank you so much, Anier82! In my source it's written with 爫 instead of ⺈ (maybe just a mistake?), that's why I couldn't find it as I counted two strokes too many!

i think maybe it is because people recorded or duplicated by handwriting instead of print, there could be some mistakes. that is also the reason why sometimes we'll find a simplified chinese character has more than one traditional forms.

Yes, that is the character flame Yan4.