What 𗿊 means
𗿊 means “body” in Tangut; scholars write its reconstructed reading as *low. The asterisk marks a scholarly reconstruction, not a directly recorded pronunciation.
The Tangut script was developed for the Tangut language under Western Xia rule around 1036 CE. It served official and cultural needs; surviving material includes translations of Buddhist texts, legal works, classics, literature, inscriptions, and manuscripts. It continued through the Yuan and Ming dynasties and was obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty.
Why does 𗿊 look Chinese?
It looks like Chinese writing, but 𗿊 belongs to Tangut. Tangut is described as a siniform script: its characters have a square form familiar from Chinese writing. The resemblance is about style; 𗿊 belongs to writing for the Tangut language, not Chinese.
Historical and specialist; “body” is the English gloss of a Tangut word.
Outside Tangut context, readers may not recognize the glyph as meaning “body.”
Questions people ask
1Will 𗿊 look identical in every font?
No. Tangut source materials preserve different glyph forms, and Unicode may treat some variants as one character. Fonts can therefore draw 𗿊 differently without changing its encoded identity.
How to type 𗿊
𗿊\17FCACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.