Zhuang character ndai

In Zhuang, ndai means loosening a field’s soil with a harrow.

A Zhuang vocabulary list pairs ndai with naz, “paddy field,” placing the word in rice farming.

Its shape comes from an older Zhuang writing tradition

Sawndip developed by adapting and recombining Chinese character forms to write Zhuang. By the Southern Song, such characters appeared in contracts and legal papers; the tradition also carried songs, stories, and ritual texts.

This exact form is listed in the Dictionary of Old Zhuang Characters (1989). A Latin-based Zhuang script was introduced in 1955 and revised in the 1980s for teaching and publishing.