Tangut Character 𗷊

Its Unicode name does not give its word or pronunciation. 𗷊 is a Tangut logograph—a character that represents a word or meaningful word-part. The Unicode chart links it to entry L2008-6054 in Li Fanwen's 2008 Tangut-Chinese dictionary and places it at 217.16 in the radical-and-stroke index, a way to find characters by their components and strokes. Those are lookup references, not a gloss; identify its reading in a Tangut dictionary or the surrounding text.

A similar-looking Han character is not a substitute: Tangut was written for a different language and has its own script. Unicode encodes Tangut as its own script, not as Han characters.

Why was the Tangut script created?

The Tangut script was developed for writing Tangut and disseminated around 1036 under Western Xia rule. The Western Xia state used it for official and cultural writing; historical accounts differ on whether one official should be credited with its creation.

Tangut writing appeared in books, Buddhist sutras, inscriptions, and manuscripts. After the Mongols conquered Western Xia in 1227, written Tangut continued under Yuan and Ming rule before the script became obsolete. Modern scholars later recovered it through bilingual evidence and surviving texts. Those shifts explain the script's history, not a change in this character's meaning.