Shuǐ 水
The character for ‘water’, and radical 85 of the 214 Kangxi radicals: the one under which dictionaries file characters for rivers, seas and liquids.
Meaning
On the left of a character 水 is written as three short strokes, 氵, which Unihan gives as ‘water; radical number 85’. 河 ‘river; stream; the Yellow River’ and 海 ‘sea, ocean; maritime’ are both filed under it, as radical 85 with five and seven strokes more. In Mandarin the character is read shuǐ; Japanese, which writes it as a kanji, reads it mizu.
Origin and history
Léon Wieger, in his Chinese Characters (quoted here from the 1927 edition), read 水 as a stream: “The central stroke represents a brook, a rivulet,” and the small strokes on either side “represent the whirls of water.” He noted the modern contracted forms and called it the radical “of characters relating to water and streams”.
Three strokes for water, two for ice
Three strokes down the left side are water. Two are a different radical: 冫, radical 15, which Unihan defines as ‘ice’ and under which it files 冰 ‘ice; ice-cold’. Wieger saw in it “the rays that appear by crystallisation at the surface of water when it is freezing”, and made it the radical of “characters referring to cold, freezing, and ice”.
How a dictionary finds a water character
A radical dictionary sorts characters by radical and then by the strokes left over, as the Unicode Standard explains. 海 is 水 (as 氵) plus seven strokes, so it is found in the section for radical 85, among the characters with seven strokes more. Rain, 雨, is a radical of its own, number 173.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsHuǒ 火The character for ‘fire’, and radical 86 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for heat, flame and burning are filed.
- Water, 水, 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
Yǔ 雨, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+6C34, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun; kSemanticVariant
- Unihan data for U+6C35, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+6CB3, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+6D77, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+51AB, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+51B0, 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), Lessons 125 A and 17 A
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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