This has bugged me far more than it ought to have.
What function does 栠 serve? It obviously exists in Unicode, Chinese dictionaries, and other reference material, but nobody writing in English seems to have the first idea of what purpose it serves in the language. I’m aware of certain Chinese characters representing grammatical particles and, therefore, not having a translation as such, but their role in a sentence could certainly be described in English.
Don’t worry about getting technical; I’m willing to 忍 through any linguistic explanation at this point.
It looks like 栠 is not used for anything in modern Chinese, though the fact that it exists probably means it has some archaic use.
I’m disappointed I don’t get to give a technical linguistic explanation, as you invite. But for that, you’d have to be asking about something like 把 or 了 or 的, which are extremely common in both written and spoken Chinese, and strictly speaking untranslatable, but in my experience usually given a brief explanation in Chinese-English dictionaries.
According to several Chinese sources that I manage to find on the Internet (this one, for example, which actually contains several cites within the post), it means something along the line of ‘weak’ or ‘the appearance of weakness’. This is definitely not a common character in modern usage. It’s not even in my Chinese dictionary (I admit, it’s a small pocket-sized one, but still).
There is a set of standard radicals that every Chinese character is associated with. The radical is a part of the character, and for many characters, it’s pretty obvious which radical they belong to. There’s an index containing the page number of each radical, and all characters belonging to the same radical are grouped together and ordered by the number of strokes in the non-radical part of the character. There’s also a different index for characters where the radical may not be obvious. It is ordered by the number of strokes of the entire character. This is a much longer list, so it is more of a PITA.
‘Telegraphic code’ is something I know enough to comment on. Back when telegraphy was being introduced to China, there was an obvious problem: How do you assign each character a distinct sequence of dots and dashes to send down a telegraph line without causing everyone to go insane? The Chinese method was to assign each character a number and then tackle the much easier problem of assigning each of the ten digits a unique sequence of dots and dashes. This required a lot of code books that matched numbers to characters, but everyone got to keep their sanity.
According to an online dictionary, it’s sometimes used for 荏, which is a type of grass, and also means weak or soft. The former definition is presumably why it has the 木 radical, and the 任 part is for the sound.
