Hi all,
I have come across this character that I can not find in any of my dictionaries. It has a kou
What context did you see it in? I asked the Cantonese speakers around my office and it doesn’t seem to be a Cantonese creation.
Oh, that’s an obsolete variant of 嗅 xiu4, smell. It can also be written with 鼻 bi2 ‘nose’ on the left and 臭 chou4 on the right. Source: Hanyu Da Zidian p.282.
Give us the context! Could it be a Taiwanese coinage to represent a sound with no obvious character?
TFT
P.S. Like the sick new avatar? Mwahaha. That’s me after nine hours a day, five days a week of staring at a bloody screen.
Oops - Dragonbones posted while I was typing. Well done sir!
But you could still be right – it might be some kind of phonetic loan for a regionalect like Min3nan2hua4 or slang… I too would be interested in seeing the context. But my initial guess would be classical Chinese literature or poetry, Han stelae, etc.
Tell you what, folks. I reckon Dragonbones has forgoten more about Chinese characters than most of us will ever know…
… mind you, he is pretty forgetful. 
[quote=“irishstu”]Tell you what, folks. I reckon Dragonbones has forgoten more about Chinese characters than most of us will ever know…
… mind you, he is pretty forgetful. :p[/quote]
It’s not as if I actually knew that character, lol. I just looked it up by the dictionary’s component index…
Dragonbones, is that an electronic version, or the good old fashioned housebrick (book).
HG
I use the massive tomes. I like to be able to write notes in the margins. In this particular dictionary, the definitions of characters may be written using other obsolete characters, and being able to write the meaning, pronunciation and page number thereof is, for me, absolutely vital. Until the electronic versions allow you to add notes, or at least to hold the cursor over a character to get cross-reference info (a la Dr. Eye), I won’t use them.
Cheers.
HG