Tangut character U+178C3

It can mean “word,” “sentence,” or, in context, “expression.”

Li Fanwen’s 2008 Tangut–Chinese dictionary lists the reconstructed reading gjwi, a scholarly transcription in Latin letters, and glosses it as “word” or “sentence.” The reading is not an English translation.

In a Tangut Buddhist passage discussed in a 2018 study, “expression” better fits the phrase 𗹙𗣃. That local reading is why a dictionary gloss should not be forced onto every sentence.

Is 𗣃 Chinese or Tangut?

It is Tangut writing, not a Chinese character.

The script was devised around 1036 at the command of a Western Xia emperor. The state used it for government, for Buddhist texts in Tangut, and to establish a written identity distinct from China under the Song dynasty. It appears in official, private, and religious works: books, Buddhist scriptures, inscriptions, and manuscripts.

Tangut writing continued after Western Xia fell and fell out of use by the end of the Ming dynasty. Its strokes resemble Chinese writing, but the script uses different characters and cannot be read as Chinese. The Tangut project also followed earlier script-making by the neighboring Khitan, another people with their own writing system.

Why can 𗣃 look different in fonts?

One character can have more than one historical outline.

Fonts can draw the same encoded character with different outlines. Unicode reference glyphs are not prescriptive, and Tangut sources preserve variant shapes, so a changed outline does not by itself identify a different character.