Radical-and-stroke sorting

Radical-and-stroke sorting

Another form of collation is radical-and-stroke sorting, used for non-alphabetic writing systems such as the hanzi of Chinese and the kanji of Japanese, whose thousands of symbols defy ordering by convention. In this system, common components of characters are identified; these are called radicals in Chinese and logographic systems derived from Chinese. Characters are then grouped by their primary radical, then ordered by number of pen strokes within radicals. When there is no obvious radical or more than one radical, convention governs which is used for collation. For example, the Chinese character 妈 (meaning "mother") is sorted as a six-stroke character under the three-stroke primary radical 女 (meaning "woman").