Han character

It writes the Tày word khoẳm.

Depending on the phrase, khoẳm means “turn upside down,” “lie face down,” “hunch,” or “lower the head”; a Tày–Vietnamese dictionary illustrates the first sense with an inverted bowl.

Nôm Tày is a traditional script built from Han characters to record Tày speech, and its literary works go back centuries. One proposal links its beginnings to Tày writers Bế Văn Phụng and Nông Quỳnh Vân at the Mạc royal court in Cao Bằng, northern Vietnam, in the 16th–17th centuries. The introduction to a 2003 dictionary leaves the start date open and notes regional, dialect, and scribal variation.