Tangut Ideograph 17C95

𗲕 is a Tangut character; its word meaning depends on its text.

The Tangut script, also called Xixia, was disseminated around 1036 in the Western Xia state to write Tangut. It served official, private, and religious writing. After the state fell to the Mongols in 1227, use continued especially in Buddhist texts; the script became obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty.

A bilingual stone tablet was identified in 1804, and major manuscript discoveries at Khara-Khoto followed in 1908–09. The Unicode label identifies the encoded sign; the surrounding Tangut words carry its lexical meaning.

Why does Tangut look Chinese?

Tangut resembles Chinese writing, but it is a distinct script.

Tangut developed in a writing environment influenced by Chinese. Its signs resemble Chinese characters, but 𗲕 is not a Chinese character or a Chinese reading. Khitan and Jurchen are other scripts from the broader North Asian setting; they are historical neighbors, not alternate forms of this character.

Traditional Tangut books set text in vertical columns running right to left; scholarly editions may print it horizontally, left to right. Some source-specific glyph shapes are treated as one character when they do not distinguish words in that source, so fonts can draw the same encoded character differently.