List of the 214 Kangxi Radicals - old style

The 214 Kangxi radicals (), also known as the Zihui radicals, form a system of radicals () of

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

. The radicals are numbered in stroke count order. They are the most popular system of radicals for dictionaries that order

Traditional Chinese characters Traditional Chinese characters are one type of standard Chinese character sets of the contemporary written Chinese. The traditional characters had taken shapes since the clerical change and mostly remained in the same structure they took ...

(''hanzi'', ''hanja'', ''kanji'', ''chữ hán'') by radical and stroke count. They are officially part of the Unicode encoding system for CJKV characters, in their standard order, under the coding block "Kangxi radicals", while their graphic variants are contained in the "CJK Radicals Supplement". Thus, a reference to "

radical 61 Radical 61 or radical heart () meaning "heart" is one of 34 of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 4 strokes. When appearing at the left side of a Chinese character, the radical transforms into , which consists of three strokes. When a ...

", for example, without additional context, refers to the 61st radical of the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', 心; ''xīn'' "heart". Originally introduced in the 1615 ''

Zihui The 1615 ''Zìhuì'' is a Chinese dictionary edited by the Ming Dynasty scholar Mei Yingzuo ( 梅膺祚). It is renowned for introducing two lexicographical innovations that continue to be used in the present day: the 214-radical system for i ...

'' (字彙), they are more commonly named in relation to the ''

Kangxi Dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' ( (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing ...

'' of 1716 ('' Kāngxī'' being the

era name A regnal year is a year of the reign of a sovereign, from the Latin ''regnum'' meaning kingdom, rule. Regnal years considered the date as an ordinal, not a cardinal number. For example, a monarch could have a first year of rule, a second year of ...

for 1662–1723). The 1915 encyclopedic word dictionary ''Ciyuan'' (辭源) also uses this system. In modern times, many dictionaries that list Traditional Chinese head characters continue to use this system. For example, the '' Wang Li Character Dictionary of Ancient Chinese'' (王力古漢語字典, 2000) adopted the Kangxi radicals system. The system of 214 Kangxi radicals is based on the older system of 540 radicals used in the Han-era ''

Shuowen Jiezi ''Shuowen Jiezi'' () is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the ''Erya'' predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give t ...

''. Since 2009, the PRC government has promoted a 201-radical system (''Table of Han Character Radicals'', 汉字部首表) as a national standard for

Simplified Chinese Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to: Mathematics Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one, that is simpler (usually shorter), for example * Simplification of algebraic expressions, ...

(see ''

Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components ''The Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components'' () is a lexicographic tool used to order the Chinese characters in mainland China. The specification is also known as GF 0011-2009. In China's normative documents, "radical" is defined as any ...

'').

Statistics

The Kangxi dictionary lists a total of 47,035 characters divided among the 214 radicals, for an average of 220 characters per radical, but distribution is unequal, the median number of characters per radical being 64, with a maximum number of 1,902 characters (for

radical 140 Radical 140 or radical grass () meaning "grass" is one of 29 of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 6 strokes. It transforms into when appearing at the top of a character or component. In the '' Kangxi Dictionary'' and in modern standa ...

) and a minimum number of five (

radical 138 Radical 138 or radical stopping () meaning "" or "" is one of the 29 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 6 strokes. In Taoist Bagua cosmology, 艮 is the seventh of eight trigrams. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', there are just fiv ...

). The radicals have between one and seventeen strokes, the median number of strokes being 5 while the average number of strokes is slightly below 5.7. The ten radicals with the largest number of characters account for 10,665 characters (or 23% of the dictionary). The same ten radicals account for 7,141 out of 20,992 characters (34%) in the Unicode

CJK Unified Ideographs The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background, collectively known as CJK characters. In the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Unicode ...

block as introduced in 1992, as follows:

Modern dictionaries

Modern Chinese dictionaries continue to use the Kangxi radical-stroke order, both in traditional ''zìdiǎn'' (, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanj ...

s and modern ''cídiǎn'' ( "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken expressions. The 214 Kangxi radicals act as a de facto standard, which may not be duplicated exactly in every Chinese dictionary, but which few dictionary compilers can afford to completely ignore. They also serve as the basis for many computer encoding systems, including

Unihan Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature s ...

. The number of radicals may be reduced in modern practical dictionaries, as some of the more obscure Kangxi radicals do not form any characters that remain in frequent use. Thus, the ''Oxford Concise English–Chinese Dictionary'' (), for example, has 188 radicals. The '' Xinhua Zidian'', a pocket-sized character dictionary containing about 13,000 characters, uses 189 radicals, later (10th ed.) increased to 201 to conform to a national standard (see List of ''Xinhua Zidian'' radicals). A few dictionaries also introduce new radicals, treating groups of radicals that are used together in many different characters as a kind of radical. For example, ''

Hanyu Da Cidian The ''Hanyu Da Cidian'' () is the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary. Lexicographically comparable to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', it has diachronic coverage of the Chinese language, and traces usage over three millennia from Ch ...

'', the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary (published in 1993) has 23,000 head character entries organised by a novel system of 200 radicals.

Table of radicals

In Unicode

In Unicode version 3.0 (1999), a separate Kangxi Radicals block was introduced which encodes the 214 radicals in sequence, at U+2F00–2FD5. These are specific code points intended to represent the radical ''qua'' radical, as opposed to the character consisting of the unaugmented radical; thus, U+2F00 represents

radical 1 Radical 1 or radical one () meaning "one" is one of the 6 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 1 stroke. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', there are 42 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical. is also the 1st index ...

while U+4E00 represents the character ''yī'' meaning "one". In addition, the CJK Radicals Supplement block (2E80–2EFF) was introduced, encoding alternative (often positional) forms taken by Kangxi radicals as they appear within specific characters. For example, ⺁ "CJK RADICAL CLIFF" (U+2E81) is a variant of ⼚

radical 27 Radical 27 or radical cliff () meaning "cliff" is one of the 23 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals total) composed of two strokes. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'', there are 129 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical. is also the 7t ...

(U+2F1A), itself identical in shape to the character consisting of unaugmented radical 27, 厂 "cliff" (U+5382).

References

* An Analysis of the Two Chinese Radical Systems, Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 13, 2, 95–109, May 78

External links

Simplified Chinese characters with English definitions, grouped by radicals

Table of the 214 radicals in the unicode project

List of radicals in home-printable A4 layoutarchived copy
at the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

)
List of 214 Japanese radicals and exceptions to Kangxi
searchable and grouped by stroke number
Tangorin
search Japanese kanji using the 214 Kangxi radicals
archived copy
at the