This is a fragment. Fragments are only ever parts of characters; they never appear on their own as characters, and so they do not have pronunciations. Fragments are always printed in gray. We only give them meanings so that we can use them in equations and stories.

A vertical stroke occurs in many characters of course, but we will not treat every vertical stroke as a “stick”. For example, it seems more natural to treat 十 “ten” as a basic building block, rather than trying to decompose it into “one” plus “stick”. Instead, we reserve “stick” for situations where it stands on its own (as in Character 19 below).