swastika

The swastika is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing (卐) form or its mirrored left-facing (卍) form. Earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization of Pakistan as well as Classical Antiquity. It remains widely used in Eastern religions, specifically in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Following a brief surge of popularity in Western culture, the swastika from the 1930s became strongly associated with its iconic usage by Nazi Germany, and it has hence become stigmatized and to some extent taboo in the Western world; it has notably been outlawed in Germany if used as a symbol of Nazism. Many modern political extremists and Neo-Nazi groups such as Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and Russian National Unity use stylised swastikas or similar symbols.

The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck. It is composed of su- meaning "good, well" and asti "to be" svasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka either forms a diminutive or intensifies the verbal meaning, and svastika might thus be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious." The word in this sense is first used in the Harivamsa.^[2]As noted by Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English dictionary, according to Alexander Cunningham, its shape represents a monogram formed by interlacing of the letters of the auspicious words su-astí (svasti) written in Ashokan characters

The Sanskrit term has been in use in English since 1871, replacing gammadion (from Greek γαμμάδιον). Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit word include suastika,swastica and svastica.

Other names for the shape are:

• crooked cross, hook cross or angled cross (German: Hakenkreuz).
• cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny, in heraldry, as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz).
• fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture. The term is coined in the 19th century based on a misunderstanding of a Renaissance manuscript.
• gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek: τέτραγαμμάδιον), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter Γ (gamma).
• sun wheel, a name also used as a synonym for the sun cross.
• tetraskelion (Greek: τετρασκέλιον), literally meaning "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion (Greek: τρισκέλιον)).
• The Tibetan swastika (卍) is known as g-yung drung

The Buddhist sign has been standardised as a Chinese character 卍 (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages such as Japanese where the symbol is called卍字 (manji). The swastika is included as part of the Chinese script in the form of the character "萬" (pinyin: wàn) and has Unicode encodings U+534D 卍 (left-facing) and U+5350 卐 (right-facing). In Unicode 5.2, four swastika symbols were added to the Tibetan block: U+0FD5 ࿕ (right-facing), U+0FD6 ࿖ (left-facing), U+0FD7 ࿗ (right-facing with dots) and U+0FD8 ࿘ (left-facing with dots)