Tangut character 171BD

It means “to pull out” or “to take out.”

A Tangut dictionary gives those as two close English renderings of one entry, not unrelated senses.

A specialist reading Tangut meets it as a word in an extinct language; outside that context, the glyph alone does not reveal its meaning.

Why did Western Xia use Tangut writing?

Tangut gave the Western Xia court a writing system for its language.

The script was promulgated around 1036 under Western Xia rule. The ruler Li Yuanhao ordered his adviser Yeli Renrong to prepare handwriting models for Tangut; that order concerns the script as a whole, not the origin of this individual character.

Tangut served official records, religious works, inscriptions and manuscripts. Its forms drew on Chinese regular script, a standard style of Chinese writing, but Tangut is a separate script with its own characters and readings. After Western Xia ended, it remained in use into the mid-Ming period before becoming obsolete; its later role became scholarly study and digital encoding.

Why does 𗆽 show as a box?

A font or app without Tangut support may show a missing box.

Fonts that draw common Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters may still lack Tangut, which is a separate script.

Reference sources preserve different source-based drawings of 𗆽, and Unicode's Tangut glyph-correction record links its corrected design to 𗅶. The visible outline can vary while the underlying character stays the same.