Shǒu 手
The character for ‘hand’, and radical 64 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for things done with the hands are filed.
Meaning
On the left of a character 手 becomes 扌, three strokes, which Unihan gives as ‘hand; radical number 64’: 打 ‘strike, hit, beat; fight; attack’ is filed under it. Under another part it keeps its full form, as in 拿 ‘take, hold, grasp; bring’. Mandarin reads it shǒu; Japanese, te.
Origin and history
Wieger saw in the old form a hand with its palm lines: a small mark “in the ancient form, represents the lines of the hand”. He called 手 the radical “of characters relating to the hand”.
A hand over the eye
看 ‘look, see; examine, scrutinize’ puts a hand above an eye, 目, and is filed under the eye, radical 109. Wieger glossed it “To look at, to regard carefully”, and quoted the old explanation: “in order to see well, one shades the eye” with the hand against the sun.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing 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, Shuǐ 水.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+624B, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+624C, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+6253, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+62FF, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+770B, 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 48 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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