Tangut ideograph 17B96

Use a Tangut-capable input method or a saved text snippet.

There is no ordinary emoji-keyboard route: 𗮖 is encoded text from the Tangut script, which wrote the Tangut language of Western Xia.

If it appears as a box, the active font lacks Tangut coverage; another font may draw the same encoded character differently.

What does 𗮖 mean?

A Tangut dictionary glosses 𗮖 as “to meet.”

Li Fanwen’s dictionary of the Tangut language indexes it as L2008-5431. A scholarly reconstruction writes its Tangut reading as śjwi²; this specialist notation is not an English translation.

Why was the Tangut script created?

It gave Western Xia a script for government and Buddhist texts.

Introduced under the first Western Xia emperor around 1036, Tangut wrote the kingdom’s now-extinct language, part of the Tibeto-Burman family. A Tangut Buddhist canon—a collection of Buddhist scriptures—was a central reason for creating the script, which also served government and helped distinguish the kingdom from Song China.

It drew on Chinese writing principles and followed the earlier Khitan example of creating a distinct script; the Khitan were another people and polity in the region. Tangut appeared in official, private, and religious texts, including translations from Chinese and Tibetan, and continued into the 16th century.