Khitan Small Script Character 18BEF

It is one sign in the writing system for Khitan. Unicode’s sequential character name tells you where the sign sits in the code chart, not how it was read in Khitan.

Some Khitan signs represented whole words on their own; phonetic signs represented sounds and usually joined into clusters of two to eight characters for a word. An isolated glyph may be only one part of such a cluster.

How is Khitan writing related to Chinese and Jurchen?

Chinese-character writing shaped Khitan forms; Jurchen writing later adapted Khitan models. The small script’s job was to record Khitan. A later history of the Liao dynasty, History of Liao, dates its creation to 924/925 and credits Yelü Diela. The traditional account links its design to Uyghur writing, though the scripts have few visual similarities. The earliest securely dated surviving text is a 1051 tomb inscription. A 2026 study argues that the small script was systematized later, under Emperor Shengzong.

Khitan Small Script appears across the Liao, Qara Khitai (Western Liao), and Jin periods. Its connection to Chinese-character writing is structural; it wrote Khitan, not Chinese. Later Jurchen scripts borrowed and adapted Khitan models, so the traditions are linked but not interchangeable.

Why can the same character line up differently?

Traditional Khitan text ran vertically; digital text may run horizontally. Traditional columns ran top to bottom and were arranged from right to left. Inside a phonetic cluster, the signs are ordered left to right, then top to bottom. Unicode 18.0 also describes horizontal cluster layout and a simple left-to-right row of isolated characters, so a line on screen need not preserve a historical page’s arrangement.