Xīn 心
The character for ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, and radical 61 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for thought and feeling are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 心 as ‘heart; mind, intelligence; soul’, and also as the fifth lunar mansion, whose determinative star is Antares. On the left of a character it stands upright as 忄, three strokes, ‘heart; radical number 61’, as in 情 ‘feeling, sentiment, emotion’; at the foot it keeps its full form, as in 想 ‘think, speculate, plan, consider’. Mandarin reads it xīn; Japanese, kokoro.
Origin and history
Wieger read the old form as a drawing of the organ: “On the top, the pericardium opened; in the middle, the organ; at the bottom, a summary delineation of the aorta.” He noted “modern abbreviations” of it, and called it the radical “of characters relating to the feelings”.
Upright beside, full underneath
情 is 心 (as 忄) with eight strokes more and 想 is 心 with nine, so a radical dictionary finds both under radical 61, though the heart stands on the left of one and lies under the other.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsShǒu 手The character for ‘hand’, and radical 64 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for things done with the hands are filed.
- The same shape in Tarot cardsAce of CupsThe ace of cups in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a hand from a cloud holding a cup from which four streams pour, and a dove descending with a Host. A. E. Waite read it as joy, content, nourishment and abundance.
See also
Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Mù 目, Shuǐ 水.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+5FC3, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+5FC4, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+60C5, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+60F3, 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 107 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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