Tangut character 171CD

The Tangut wordbook glosses it as “to catch fire.”

The Tangut wordbook pairs L3834 𗇍 with the Chinese gloss 起火, “to catch fire.” The separate character 𗇘 (L3835) has the same scholarly reconstructed reading—an estimate of how the extinct Tangut word sounded—but its gloss is “to extricate.”

A linguistic history from 1975 uses the romanized form lhew for a word glossed “to untie.” Later character-by-character entries distinguish the glyphs; “to catch fire” is the best-supported gloss for 𗇍.

Why does 𗇍 look like a Chinese character?

It belongs to Tangut, a separate historical script.

Tangut script was created around 1036 under the first Western Xia emperor to write the Tangut language. Its character style drew on Chinese writing, which explains the resemblance; its glyphs and readings belong to a different language. Tangut appeared in official works, Buddhist translations, and dictionaries.

After the Western Xia fell in 1227, Tangut writing continued through the Yuan and Ming periods and became obsolete by the end of the Ming. Surviving Buddhist books, inscriptions, and manuscripts preserve Tangut writing.