Khitan Small Script Character

𘯟 is one character in Khitan (Qidan) small script, a partly deciphered system for writing Khitan. Its reading makes sense in context; the character alone does not give a full English word.

Text symbol

What 𘯟 means

It is a character in Khitan small script, not an image.

A 2010 encoding proposal maps it to catalog entry J-0215 and gives “uh” as a sound value. Treat that as a research reading, not an English translation.

How did Khitan small script change over time?

It wrote Khitan and later influenced Jurchen scripts.

Tradition credits Yelü Diela, the Khitan emperor’s younger brother, with creating it around 925 CE. Chinese characters shaped its forms; the Uyghur script, used by Turkic peoples, influenced its design. The earliest securely dated surviving text is a 1051 tomb inscription. Liao and Jin used it officially; Jin’s Jurchen rulers later modeled their scripts on it. Original texts ran vertically right to left; modern transcriptions may run horizontally, with sound signs grouped in word clusters.

Part of the collection

𘬣

Khitan Small Script

Who writes 𘯟

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Questions people ask

Why does 𘯟 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.