Cǎo 艸
The character for ‘grass’, and radical 140 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which the names of plants and flowers are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 艸 as ‘grass’ and lists 草 ‘grass, straw, thatch, herbs’ as a variant of it. In characters it is written on top as 艹, four strokes, as in 花 ‘flower; blossoms’ and in 草 itself; both are filed under radical 140. Mandarin reads it cǎo; Japanese, kusa.
Origin and history
Wieger read 艸 as two plants side by side, plants “with herbaceous stems”: the doubling “means their multiplicity”. He called it the radical of characters “relating to plants”, and noted its “Modern contracted” form, 艹.
Grass on top
花 is radical 140 with four strokes more, 草 with six. The other plant radicals with pages here are tree, 木, and bamboo, 竹, which is written on top of its characters too.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsZhú 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.
- The same shape in Chinese mythology and symbolsDouble happiness (囍)囍, the character 喜 (xǐ, joy) written twice and joined into one sign, read shuangxi, “double happiness”. It is the sign of a Chinese wedding, pasted on the door and worked into the couple’s gifts and furnishings.
See also
Mù 木, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+8278, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+8279, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+82B1, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+8349, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 18 (Han), The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 18: East Asia, Unicode Consortium, 18.1.8 Radical-Stroke Indices; 18.1.14 Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement
- 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), Lesson 78 B
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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