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.
Meaning
Unihan defines 糸 as ‘silk’. Traditional script writes it on the left as 糹; simplified Chinese as 纟, three strokes, so 紅 ‘red, vermillion; blush, flush’ becomes 红. 絲 ‘silk; fine thread; wire; strings’ is filed under it too, and simplifies to 丝. Mandarin reads it mì; Japanese, ito.
Origin and history
Wieger read the character as “A strong thread”: its lower part “represents the twisting of several small threads into a big one”. He called it the radical “of characters relating to textile matters or tissues”.
Red under silk
紅, ‘red’, is filed under silk, radical 120 with three strokes more, beside 絲, silk itself, with six. Unihan lists 纟 as ‘silk; Kangxi radical 120’, and the Unicode Standard places characters with this simplified radical in a group after those with 糸.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsDāo 刀The character for ‘knife’, and radical 18 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for cutting and dividing are filed.
- 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
Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+7CF8, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+7E9F, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+7D05, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+7D72, 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 92 A
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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