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What are radicals?

Radicals, or 部首 (bùshǒu) in Chinese, are the basic building blocks of all Chinese characters. They vary in complexity from one stroke to seventeen strokes. Some radicals are characters in their own right, for example xin (心), while others are only ever used as part of a character and never appear independently. Some radicals have more than one form (usually short forms), while some have both traditional and simplified forms.

Why are radicals important?

Radicals are important for two reasons. The first is that knowing the meaning of different radicals will help you to remember the meaning of many characters. More than 80% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, which means that one part of the character suggests the sound (phono) while the other part carries meaning (semantic). Most radicals are the semantic or 'meaning' component. The second reason why radicals are important is they will help you to locate the character in a dictionary or database. If you encounter a new character you will probably not know its pronunciation and therefore cannot look it up in that way, which is why the radical is so important. All Chinese dictionaries will contain a radical index, which allows you to trace the character you want.

How many radicals are there?

The number of radicals has changed considerably since they were first introduced. In the 说文解字 (Shuōwén Jiězì), a dictionary from the Han dynasty in the 2nd century AD, there were 540 radicals, at that time called 部 (bù ) meaning 'sections'. In the 字汇 (Zìhùi), which dates from 1615, the number was reduced to 214. The more famous Kāngxī Zìdiǎn (Kangxi Dictionary) of 1716, commissioned by the Qing emperor Kangxi, used the same 214 radicals. This dictionary was the first to use the term 部首 (bùshǒu), meaning 'section heading', and these radicals are today known as the Kangxi radicals. They are still the main form of categorisation for traditional characters in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Simplified characters, which have been in use in mainland China since their development in the 1950s, required a new list of radicals. Unlike with traditional characters, there is no definitive list. There are three main systems which have been developed, which use 155, 187 and 227 radicals.

Kangxi radicals

The 214 Kangxi radicals are shown below, together with variants. Characters are listed under the traditional form, with the simplified form (if this exists) shown later in the table.

Other radicals

As mentioned above, the creation of simplified characters meant the 214 Kangxi radical list had to be expanded. Below are other radicals which are used in the radical index of SinoCharacters.com