What's this new Chinese character which looks like 座? I keep seeing this new Chinese character on social media:



What is this?
Technically it isn't a new Chinese character but a Japanese character.
Eileen Chow posted about this on Twitter saying:

Winner of 2020’s new kanji contest in Japan: the character 座 (seat), ingeniously redesigned as a neologism for “social distance.”
Note the two 人 (person) radicals in the original 座 are now positioned farther away from one another!

You can find a whole list of competition candidates on the official Sousaku Kanji website.

On her twitter thread Eileen Chow also shows off some other characters with explanations. Here's another interesting one for the times:


I like this one because it is a bilingual visual pun - a 76yo entrant transformed the bottom half of the character 会 (meeting) into a “Z” to make...you guessed it, “web conferencing via Zoom”.


Seeing as they are all 漢字 - they could be easily adoptable into Chinese.