✌ - Yia4 - Victory

The Chinese language is constantly evolving, and new characters are being added all the time. ✌ has recently come into common use in writing, and was recently added to the Unicode standard (hopefully your browser can display it). It is one of those hard to translate concepts: it encompasses victory, optimism, and a “go for it!” attitude.

All characters in Chinese started out this way, as pictograms. This page at omniglot shows a few examples of this process. Who knows, in a few hundred years ✌ may similarly be simplified and stylized to be just another inscrutable character, like 馬 for horse.

Since this is a very new character, your browser may not support it yet. It has been assigned unicode code point 9996, or 0×270c, and you can see the Unicode data for it, as well as a graphical representation here at fileformat.info.