Chinese radicals
The components that organise Chinese characters, and how they grew from pictures carved on oracle bones.
Test yourself: Chinese radicals quiz
Also in: Ancient symbols
People
- Rén 人The character for 'person', and the radical found in many characters to do with people.
- Nǚ 女The character for ‘woman’ and ‘girl’, and radical 38 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters to do with women are filed.
- Zǐ 子The character for ‘child’ and ‘offspring’, and radical 39 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for children are filed.
The body
- Kǒu 口The character for ‘mouth’ and ‘opening’, and radical 30 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for eating, calling out and other uses of the mouth are filed.
- Xīn 心The character for ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, and radical 61 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for thought and feeling are filed.
- Shǒu 手The character for ‘hand’, and radical 64 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for things done with the hands are filed.
- Mù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
Water, fire and earth
- Shuǐ 水The character for ‘water’, and radical 85 of the 214 Kangxi radicals: the one under which dictionaries file characters for rivers, seas and liquids.
- Huǒ 火The character for ‘fire’, and radical 86 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for heat, flame and burning are filed.
- Tǔ 土The character for ‘earth’ and ‘soil’, and radical 32 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for the ground and what is built on it are filed.
- Jīn 金The character for ‘gold’ and for metals in general, and radical 167 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of metals are filed.
- Shān 山The character for ‘mountain’, and radical 46 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for peaks, cliffs and hills are filed.
Sky and weather
- Rì 日The character for ‘sun’ and ‘day’, and radical 72 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for light and time are filed.
- Yuè 月The character for ‘moon’ and ‘month’, and radical 74 of the 214 Kangxi radicals.
- Yǔ 雨The character for ‘rain’, and radical 173 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for snow, thunder and other weather are filed.
Plants
- Mù 木The character for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’, and radical 75 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for trees and things of wood are filed.
- Cǎo 艸The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
- Zhú 竹The character for ‘bamboo’, and radical 118 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which kinds of bamboo and things made from it are filed, among them the writing brush.
Speech, silk and blades
- Yán 言The character for ‘words’ and ‘speech’, and radical 149 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for speaking and language are filed.
- Mì 糸The character for ‘silk’ and ‘thread’, and radical 120 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for thread and textiles are filed.
- Dāo 刀The character for ‘knife’, and radical 18 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for cutting and dividing are filed.
About chinese radicals
A radical is the part of a Chinese character under which a dictionary files it. The word comes from the Latin radix, “root”, as the Unicode Standard notes. Most characters are compounds of two parts, one suggesting the sound and the other the meaning, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on Chinese writing explains, and the meaning part is usually the radical: Léon Wieger, in his Chinese Characters (1927 edition), defined it as the “formal element which gives the meaning”. This collection has twenty-one of them, among them 人 person and 水 water, each with the characters filed under it, its shapes inside other characters, and what scholars have read in its oldest form.
From 540 radicals to 214
The Shuowen, the first dictionary to arrange characters this way, used 540, John Chalmers wrote in 1882. Later dictionaries cut the number “for the sake of simplification”, Wieger wrote. Wieger dates the reduction to 214 to the Ming dynasty; the great dictionary compiled under the Kangxi emperor and finished in 1716, with about 42,000 characters by Britannica’s count, was “based upon these 214 keys”, the set the Unicode Standard calls the Kangxi radicals. The Unicode Standard, which orders its Chinese characters by the Kangxi dictionary, credits that dictionary with establishing the 214 and says they “remain the most universally recognized to this day”.
How a radical dictionary works
Each character is treated as a radical plus residual strokes. The Unicode Standard’s example is 說, “speak”: it is filed under 言, speech, with seven strokes more, so a reader turns to the section for 言 and then to the characters with seven strokes. Many radicals change shape inside a character. Water, 水, has a second form, 氵, and Unicode encodes both; fire has a contracted form “used in combination, at the bottom of the compounds”, and knife another “when it is placed on the side”, Wieger noted. Dictionaries do not always agree on which radical a character belongs under, and simplified characters are hard to fit into the old system, the Standard adds.
The critics
Neither Chalmers nor Wieger liked the reduction. To Chalmers it was “a great scientific blunder” that forced “the arbitrary placing of many words under radicals with which they have no connection whatever”, though for everyday use the Kangxi “arrangement is as unalterable as our alphabet”. Wieger called the result “half logical, half arbitrary”, and the Kangxi dictionary “easy enough to consult and precise in its definitions” but no guide to where characters came from. His readings of the oldest forms are quoted on each page as his, a view from 1927; where a later source reads a form differently, as Britannica does for 女, the page gives both.
The radicals here
People: 人 person, 女 woman, 子 child. The body: 口 mouth, 心 heart, 手 hand, 目 eye. Water, fire and earth: 水, 火, 土 earth, 金 metal, 山 mountain. Sky and weather: 日 sun, 月 moon, 雨 rain. Plants: 木 tree, 艸 grass, 竹 bamboo. Speech, silk and blades: 言 speech, 糸 silk, 刀 knife.
Sources
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 18 (Han), The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 18: East Asia, Unicode Consortium, 18.1.7 Sorting Han Ideographs; 18.1.8 Radical-Stroke Indices; 18.1.14 Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement
- Chinese writing (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 19 November 2025), History
- Kangxi zidian (Encyclopaedia Britannica), “Kangxi zidian”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 2025), Learn about this topic: influence of Kangxi
- Chinese Characters (Léon Wieger, 1927), Léon Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification, translated by L. Davrout, second edition (1927), Catholic Mission Press, Hsien-hsien (Internet Archive full text), Introduction: Primitives, Radicals, Phonetics; Classification of Characters
- An Account of the Structure of Chinese Characters (John Chalmers, 1882), John Chalmers, An Account of the Structure of Chinese Characters under 300 Primary Forms (1882), Trübner & Co., London (Internet Archive full text), Introduction
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research