Old Zhuang Character 𭵽

In Sawndip, 𭵽 can spell the Zhuang verb cawj, “to cook.” Sawndip is the traditional square-character script used to write the Zhuang language. This cooking verb was borrowed from Chinese 煑, another written form of 煮, “to cook.” A Chinese character reference also glosses 𭵽 through 炷, meaning a lamp wick or one stick of incense. That is a separate Chinese dictionary link; in a Zhuang sentence about food, “to cook” fits.

Traditional Zhuang writing developed by adapting and recombining Chinese character forms to record Zhuang speech. A stone inscription from China’s Tang dynasty, dated 682, already contains old Zhuang characters. In 1175, during the Southern Song, writer Fan Chengda reported local legal papers around Guilin using the script. Unicode, the system that assigns digital character codes, traces this glyph’s source to the 1989 Ancient Zhuang Character Dictionary; 1989 dates that catalogue, not this character’s origin.