Tangut character 𗔡

𗔡 means “to supplement” in Tangut. Scholars reconstruct its reading as ljɨ̣ from the written record.

The Tangut script was created in 1036 under the first emperor of Western Xia to write Tangut for government, private life, and religious texts. Earlier accounts credit Li Yuanhao with its basic form and the official Yeli Renrong with developing it, though that attribution is unsettled.

After Western Xia fell, Tangut continued under later dynasties and became obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty. Bilingual inscriptions and large manuscript finds later helped scholars recover its readings through dictionaries and comparisons. The number in its Unicode label identifies the encoded character; it does not translate the Tangut word.

Can 𗔡 stand for sound?

Yes, in a proposed Tangut transcription of a Tibetan name.

A 2025 study of two biographies of the Buddhist teacher Atiśa discusses a manuscript sequence written 𗣜𘎚. It notes that 𘎚 and 𗔡 share the gloss “to supplement,” then proposes 𗣜𗔡 as a Tangut transcription of the Tibetan name in scholarly Latin spelling, Mtho lding. There, 𗔡 may stand for sound instead of its dictionary gloss.