Tǔ 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.
Meaning
Unihan defines 土 as ‘soil, earth; items made of earth’. 地 ‘earth; soil, ground; region’ and 城 ‘castle; city, town’ are both filed under it. Mandarin reads it tǔ; Japanese, tsuchi.
Origin and history
Wieger read the two horizontals as layers of the ground: “The top line represents the surface, the soil; the down line represents the subsoil, the rock”. He called it the radical “of characters relating to earth”.
土 and 士
士 ‘scholar, gentleman; soldier’ has the same three strokes and is a different radical, number 33. In 土 the lower horizontal is the longer; in 士 it is the upper one, as the two characters are printed in Unihan.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsJīn 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.
- Earth, 土, 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+571F, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+5730, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+57CE, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+58EB, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; 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 81 A
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses, 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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