Tangut Ideograph-17E86

Its dictionary gloss is “wide-open.” In plain words, it describes something open across a broad area. The gloss comes from a Tangut dictionary, not from the character’s shape.

Tangut is a historical language once written in the Western Xia state. The Tangut script was created around 1036 under Li Yuanhao, ruler of Western Xia, to support state-building, a Buddhist canon, and an identity distinct from Song China. The Tanguts followed a regional precedent: the Khitan, a neighboring medieval people, had created scripts a century earlier. That parallel does not establish that Tangut writing descended from Khitan scripts. Surviving Tangut books include Buddhist, Confucian, military, and literary works.

An early record of 𗺆 appears at 11.241 in Wénhǎi (“Sea of Characters”), a 12th-century Tangut rhyme dictionary that organized words by sound and rhyme. After Tangut stopped being an everyday written language, the character’s setting shifted to dictionaries, fonts, and scholarship. Tangut writing continued after Western Xia fell and was obsolete by the end of the Ming period.

How do I type this Tangut character?

Use an input tool built for Tangut. Some tools search by an English dictionary gloss, handwriting, or a code scheme loaded from a dictionary. The keystroke depends on the selected scheme, so a regular keyboard layout alone will not identify the character reliably.