Khitan Small Script character 𘱛

By itself, 𘱛 has no secure translation.

Khitan Small Script is only partly deciphered, so many phonetic readings remain unknown. The strongest evidence for 𘱛 comes in the pair 𘱛‍𘳑: its reconstructed Khitan reading, conventionally written in Latin letters as qudug, means “good fortune.” Treat the lone character as part of that reading, not as a complete translation.

Khitan Small Script was created about 925 to write Khitan, and its invention is traditionally credited to Yelü Diela. It was a practical redesign of the earlier large script, which was less suited to Khitan words with attached endings; the small script used phonetic elements. Most surviving examples are stone funerary inscriptions, but the script also appears in Liao, Qara Khitai, and Jin contexts, and was used for documents, poetry, histories, translations, and examinations. Its design was said to draw on Uyghur writing; later Jurchen writing used related cluster structures.

Why does 𘱛‍𘳑 sometimes stay split?

Font and layout support determine how the sequence appears.

Khitan writing normally groups sound signs (phonograms) into clusters, arranged in vertical columns read from top to bottom and right to left. Fonts intended for linear scholarly text can show characters one after another; vertical fonts can compose and position them as a cluster.

For 𘱛‍𘳑, a font with the documented invisible-joiner ligature can show one combined glyph. If the pair stays separate, the font or app is not applying that shaping; the reading has not changed.