Tangut character 186ED

A Tangut dictionary gives its meaning as “joy” or “gladness.” The entry also gives a reconstructed Tangut reading—a scholarly estimate of its historical pronunciation. The Chinese gloss translates the meaning, not the pronunciation.

The Tangut script was created under the first Western Xia emperor around 1036 for the Tangut language. It served official writing and translations of Buddhist texts and Chinese classics. After falling out of daily use, it was rediscovered in the late 19th century; bilingual materials and scholarship in the early 20th century enabled substantial decipherment.

Is 𘛭 Chinese or Tangut?

It is Tangut, a separate writing system.

Its square forms reflect Chinese influence. Readers familiar with Chinese characters may recognize the style, but that familiarity does not supply a Chinese reading; the character belongs to another language and script.

Historical sources preserve variant shapes. Unicode encodes some source variants as one character when they did not distinguish words, so fonts can draw Tangut characters differently. A missing box means the font lacks Tangut support.