Tangut Ideograph-17A47

It means “ear of grain,” read niọ.

In the Tangut Homophones, a medieval pronunciation dictionary, 𗩇 is listed with the reading niọ, a word for an ear or spike of grain. That gloss comes from the source tradition, not from any resemblance to a modern Chinese character.

An earlier edition of the Homophones dated 1132 already preserves this reading, making it one of the oldest surviving witnesses to the character’s use.

Why do references give 𗩇 two readings?

The grain form and the ku form use different components.

In the Homophones, the right-hand component 𘢿 marks the niọ reading. In the Combined Edition of the Homophones and Sea of Writing dictionaries, a similar-looking form carries 𘤧 and is read ku; Unicode’s correction work encodes that form separately as 𘟱. Older dictionaries sometimes list both under one entry, which makes a bare gloss look contradictory.

So check the component and the source title. The ku evidence carries glosses like “millet sprouts” or the Chinese surname Gu; neither is the default meaning of 𗩇.

Why was Tangut writing created?

It was an imperial state-building script for Buddhist and civic texts.

The Tangut script was created about 1036 under the first emperor of Western Xia, the empire the Tanguts ruled in north-western China. The court needed a native script for administration and a Tangut Buddhist canon, while also building an identity distinct from China’s Song dynasty. It was then used for official, private, and religious writing.

Tangut borrowed the visual and compositional prestige of Chinese writing without being Chinese; it is a separate system, in a regional tradition also seen among the Khitan, whose scripts predate it. After Western Xia fell, Tangut writing lived on in Yuan and Ming Buddhist texts before fading out by the end of Ming.