Nüshu syllable pwe35

It represents the Jiangyong syllable pwe35 in Nüshu.

The pwe35 spelling is a romanized pronunciation label; its final digits mark the tone. Nüshu writes Jiangyong’s local Chinese speech with syllable signs, and one sound may match several words. The surrounding sentence tells you which word 𛊷 represents.

What was Nüshu used for?

Traditionally, women wrote Nüshu on paper and fans, and embroidered it on clothing, handkerchiefs and belts. Women with limited access to education in Chinese characters used it for letters, poems, songs and life stories; sworn sisters gave brides cloth-bound poem booklets on the third day after a wedding.

Nüshu’s forms adapted Chinese character shapes to write local speech, but when and how the script emerged remain disputed. The earliest known artifact is a bronze coin from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a rebel state in China (1851–1864), bearing an inscription that joins women as one family. A Hunan survey published in 1931 provides the earliest written account identified in scholarly sources.

By the late twentieth century, few fluent users remained, and Nüshu had become a focus of study and preservation.