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.
Meaning
Unihan defines 金 as ‘gold; metals in general; money’. 銀 ‘silver’ and 鐵 ‘iron’ are filed under it. On the left of a character traditional script writes it 釒; simplified Chinese writes 钅, five strokes, so 銀 becomes 银 and 鐵 becomes 铁. Mandarin reads it jīn; Japanese, kane.
Origin and history
Wieger gives two readings of the old form. The first, which he credits to “Li-ssi”, follows “the Chinese geology”, in which “metals are born from the earth”: the character shows “two grains or nuggets of gold” in the bosom of the earth, 土. Wieger’s own reading went back to an older character, made of “four nuggets”, horizontal lines for the layers of ore and a cover showing that the whole was hidden underground: “Evidently a primitive.”
Metals in the radical dictionary
Wieger called 金 the radical of “a group of characters describing metals and their uses”. 銀 silver is radical 167 with six strokes more, 鐵 iron with thirteen. Unihan lists 钅 as ‘gold; money; Kangxi radical 167’, and the Unicode Standard places characters with a simplified radical in a group after those with the traditional radical it comes from.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsShān 山The character for ‘mountain’, and radical 46 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for peaks, cliffs and hills are filed.
- Metal, 金, 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
Tǔ 土, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+91D1, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+91D2, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+9485, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+9280, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+9435, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- 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 14 L
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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