Tangut Component 575

It is one piece used to find and analyze full Tangut characters. In dictionaries, components serve as index keys; in character descriptions, they identify structural parts. “575” is this entry’s catalog number, not a word gloss.

The Tangut script, also called Xixia, was created under Western Xia’s first emperor around 1036 to write the Tangut language. It appears in official, private, and religious works, including Buddhist books. After Western Xia fell in 1227, it continued under the Yuan and Ming dynasties and became obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty. Scholars rediscovered it in the late 19th century; N. A. Nevskij’s work in the early 20th century helped decipher it.

Tangut characters can look like Chinese characters. Both scripts traditionally used vertical columns, written top to bottom with the columns ordered right to left, but they are distinct and unrelated.