Yán 言
The character for ‘words’ and ‘speech’, and radical 149 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for speaking and language are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 言 as ‘words, speech; speak, say’. 語 ‘language, words’ and 說 ‘speak, say, talk’ are filed under it. Simplified Chinese writes it on the left as 讠, two strokes, so 語 becomes 语 and 說 becomes 说. Mandarin reads it yán; Japanese, koto.
Origin and history
Wieger read 言 as “Words issuing” from the mouth, the small 口 at its foot, and quoted the old gloss that calls them “The sounds of the heart”. He made it the radical “of characters relating to speech”.
Looking up 說
The Unicode Standard uses 說 to show how a radical dictionary works. 說 is assigned to the radical 言 with seven residual strokes, so a reader first finds the section for 言, then the characters with seven strokes more. Unihan records the same thing as 149.7: radical 149, seven strokes.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsMì 糸The character for ‘silk’ and ‘thread’, and radical 120 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for thread and textiles 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
Kǒu 口, Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+8A00, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+8BA0, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+8A9E, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition; kSimplifiedVariant
- Unihan data for U+8AAA, 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 73 F
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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