Khitan Small Script Character 18B56

𘭖 is a Khitan phonogram, a sign for speech sounds, reconstructed as us. The script served to write Khitan and survives chiefly in inscriptions. Tradition dates it to about 925; the earliest securely dated text is a 1051 epitaph.

Text symbol

What 𘭖 means

No; it records a sound, not a whole word.

Khitan sound signs pair with whole-word signs. Scholars reconstruct its Khitan sound as us, not a translation. Such signs cluster into words; alone, this is only a fragment.

Khitan writing shaped Jurchen scripts

Tradition credits Yelü Diela, a brother of a Liao emperor, with creating it. Chinese characters shaped its forms; Uyghur script, a Central Asian writing system, may have influenced its sound rules. A 2026 study questions whether it was fully systematized at its creation.

Khitan writing lasted into the Western Liao and Jin. During the Jin era, Jurchens modeled their own scripts on Khitan. Most surviving texts are tomb inscriptions; others appear on monuments and official objects.

Part of the collection

𘬣

Khitan Small Script

Who writes 𘭖

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Questions people ask

Why does 𘭖 show as a box on some devices?

It is recent: Unicode added it in version 13.0 (2020), and phones and computers whose fonts are older than that have nothing to draw it with. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.