Chinese radicals: the 214 Kangxi radicals

What is a Chinese radical?

A radical (部首, bùshǒu) is the part of a character under which a dictionary files it. 河 (river), 海 (sea) and 洗 (wash) are all filed under 水 (water), which is written 氵 on the left side of a character. Many radicals hint at the meaning: characters with 木 are often about trees and wood, characters with 口 about the mouth and speaking.

Chinese has two words for it. 部首 is the radical as a dictionary heading; 偏旁 is any building block of a character, including the part that hints at the sound. In everyday use the two are often joined as 偏旁部首.

Why are there 214 radicals?

The set of 214 goes back to the Zihui dictionary of 1615 and became the standard with the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典) of 1716, which files about 47,000 characters under them. They are ordered by stroke count, from 一 with 1 stroke to 龠 with 17, and Unicode encodes them in this order as the Kangxi Radicals.

Dictionaries in mainland China now use a shorter list of 201 radicals, set by the 2009 standard 汉字部首表 (revised in 2022). Dictionaries in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea mostly keep the 214 Kangxi radicals, and so do most lists for learners.

Where a radical sits in a character

A radical can stand on any side. Chinese names many of them by their place: 旁 on the left, 头 on top, 底 at the bottom, 框 around.

A radical can change its shape with its place: 水 becomes 氵 on the left, 心 becomes 忄, 手 becomes 扌, 人 becomes 亻, and 火 becomes 灬 at the bottom.

How radicals help with an unknown character

Most characters are built from two parts: a radical for the field of meaning and a second part for the sound. 妈 (mā, mother) is 女 (woman) with 马 (mǎ), 码 (mǎ, code) is 石 (stone) with 马, and 蚂 (mǎ, as in 蚂蚁, ant) is 虫 (insect) with 马. Chinese calls them 形声字.

It is a hint, not a rule. The sound part often fits only roughly, and some characters are filed by their shape: 东 (east) is under 一 in Simplified Chinese, while its Traditional form 東 is under 木.

To find the radical of a character, type or paste it into the search box above. The table then shows its radical, and the list shows the other characters filed under it.

Radicals in Simplified and Traditional Chinese

The 214 radicals are the Traditional forms. Simplified Chinese writes some of them shorter, mostly when they stand at the side of a character:

• 言→讠
• 金→钅
• 食→饣
• 糸→纟
• 門→门
• 貝→贝
• 車→车
• 見→见
• 馬→马
• 鳥→鸟
• 魚→鱼
• 頁→页

A character keeps its radical number in both scripts: 说 and 說 (shuō, to speak) are both filed under radical 149, 言. The buttons above switch the examples and lists between Simplified and Traditional characters.

To convert a whole text between the two scripts: Simplified and Traditional converter

The 20 most used radicals

Of the 3,755 characters of the first level of GB 2312, more than half are filed under these 20 radicals. 扌, 氵, 口, 木 and 亻 alone take about one character in four.

Which radicals to learn first

Start with the 50 most used (the button above the table). About three in four common characters are filed under them, and many have a side form you will see every day: 亻 氵 扌 忄 艹 讠 纟 钅 辶 阝.

Learn each radical with two or three characters that use it, and say them out loud: the listen button uses the Chinese voice of your device. For the sounds themselves: pinyin chart with audio

The radicals, their forms, and the radical and reading of each character come from the Unicode Character Database and its Unihan database (Unicode 18.0), used under the Unicode License v3. The names and meanings were written for this page. Unihan · Licence text

HanCam shows characters, not radicals

HanCam does not show radicals. It reads printed Chinese with the camera of your iPhone or iPad and shows the characters with their pinyin, tone marks included, and the meaning. The meaning is in your phone's language where Apple's on-device translation offers it, and in English otherwise. For a character on a sign or a label, read it with HanCam, then type it into the search box on this page to see its radical.

Questions and answers