What 𘮚 means
It is a Khitan small-script sign; read it in context.
Two scholarly lists from 2009 and 2010 agree on its index number, but only one gives the reconstructed sound fẻi. Treat fẻi as a proposed pronunciation, not a translation: sound-signs combine into Khitan words.
Traditional accounts credit Yelü Diela around 925 and cite the neighboring Uyghur script as inspiration. A 2026 study argues it was standardized under Liao ruler Shengzong; the earliest securely dated surviving text is a 1051 tomb epitaph. Khitan also had a large script; both wrote Khitan alongside Chinese, and Jurchen scripts later drew on both. Small-script texts survive on epitaphs, monuments, mirrors, tallies and a jade cup. Sound-signs form compact word clusters, which a straight-line font may leave unjoined.
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Who writes 𘮚
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Questions people ask
1Why does 𘮚 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.
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How to type or find 𘮚
- Search it as
- khitan · kitan · qidan · 契丹小字 · 18b9a
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𘮚\18B9ACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.