Huǒ 火
The character for ‘fire’, and radical 86 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for heat, flame and burning are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 火 as ‘fire, flame; burn; anger, rage’. At the foot of a character it becomes four dots, 灬, ‘fire; radical number 86’: 熱 ‘hot; heat; fever’ and 照 ‘shine, illumine, reflect’ are both filed under it, and 熱 keeps the dots in its simplified form 热. Doubled, one fire above the other, it makes 炎 ‘flame, blaze; hot’. Mandarin reads it huǒ; Japanese, hi.
Origin and history
Wieger read the character as “Ascending flames”, and pointed out “the modern contracted form” of four dots “that is used in combination, at the bottom of the compounds”.
Four dots at the foot
灬 has four strokes, as 火 itself does, and sits under the rest of the character: 照 is filed as radical 86 with nine strokes more, 熱 with eleven. Wieger counted fire as the radical of “characters relating to heat”.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsTǔ 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.
- Fire, 火, is one of the five elements of the Chinese calendarFive elements (wu xing)Wood, fire, earth, metal and water: the five phases (五行 wǔxíng) of Chinese thought, which describe how things change rather than what they are made of. In the Chinese calendar each year takes the element of its heavenly stem, and the element follows the year’s last digit: years ending in 6 and 7, such as 2026 and 2027, are Fire years.
See also
Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+706B, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+706C, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+71B1, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+7167, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+708E, 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 126
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
Added .