What 𗫣 means
Its isolated form has no established English gloss.
Li Fanwen’s 2008 dictionary indexes the Tangut character as L3172 and transcribes its reconstructed reading as pa̱¹. For an English speaker, it is roughly the syllable “pa” in “papa”; superscript ¹ marks tone in that notation. That is a pronunciation clue, not an English translation. Read it within a documented Tangut word or passage to translate it.
Is 𗫣 Chinese?
No. It belongs to Tangut, a separate script for the Tangut language.
The script was created around 1036 under the first emperor of the Western Xia state to write the Tangut language, spoken in northwest China from about the 11th through the 16th centuries. It remained in use into the Yuan and Ming periods, becoming obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty. Scholars rediscovered it in the late 19th century; early 20th century research deciphered much of it. Rime Table 22, a chart that groups syllables by sound, places 𗫣 at the first position of its first column.
Why does 𗫣 look different in fonts?
A font can alter its strokes without changing the encoded character.
Tangut sources preserve different glyph shapes, and Unicode unifies some shapes when they do not distinguish characters within a source. A missing-glyph box means the font cannot display 𗫣; it does not change the character. Manuscript copies also differ: versions A and B use another sign at this place in Rime Table 22, while version E has 𗫣. This may reflect a copying variant or error, so the signs are not safely interchangeable.
Historical Tangut; today it belongs mainly in scholarly reading and reference work.
Do not guess a Chinese word from its character-like shape.
Part of collections
Who writes 𗫣
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Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does 𗫣 show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Tangut block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
More like this
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How to type or find 𗫣
- Also called
- L3172 · L2008-3172
- Search it as
- pa̱¹ · Tangut pa · Xixia character · Rime Table 22 · Tangraph · western xia writing · tangut script
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𗫣\17AE3Why is 𗫣 a box on my screen?
fsymbols draws rare signs with its own fonts, so they show here even where your device has none. An app or website without such a font shows an empty box (□) or a question mark instead. Turn our fonts off to see each sign as your device draws it by itself: a box here means a box in your chats and documents too.
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.