Dāo 刀
The character for ‘knife’, and radical 18 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for cutting and dividing are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 刀 as ‘knife; old coin; measure’. On the right of a character it is written 刂, two upright strokes, ‘knife; radical number 18’, as in 利 ‘gains, advantage, profit, merit’; underneath it keeps its own form, as in 分 ‘divide’. Mandarin reads it dāo; Japanese, katana.
Origin and history
Wieger read 刀 as an “Edge-tool, knife, sword” whose “handle is curved, to take less room. The upper hook belongs to the handle, the lower hook is the edge.” He compared it with a primitive instrument “of silex, fixed into a curved handle of wood”, flint set in a curved wooden handle. He noted “the contracted form of this character, when it is placed on the side”, 刂, and called it the radical “of characters relating to cutting”.
刀 and 力
力 ‘power, capability, influence’, radical 19, has two strokes as 刀 does. In 力 the sweeping stroke rises above the horizontal and crosses it; in 刀 it starts from the horizontal and does not cross it, as the two are printed in Unihan.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsRén 人The character for 'person', and the radical found in many characters to do with people.
- The same shape in Tarot cardsAce of CupsThe ace of cups in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a hand from a cloud holding a cup from which four streams pour, and a dove descending with a Host. A. E. Waite read it as joy, content, nourishment and abundance.
See also
Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手, Mù 目.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+5200, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+5202, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+5229, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+5206, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+529B, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; 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 52 A
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or letters and numbers.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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