Kangxi radical

List of Kangxi radicals in a font imitating the original character shapes of the Kangxi Dictionary.

Kangxi radicals are a list of 214 of Chinese characters, used originally in the 1615 Zihui and adopted by the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary, in order of the number of strokes along with some examples of characters containing them. This list has become such a common standard that sometimes radicals are referred to by number alone. A reference to "radical 61", for example, without additional context, means 心.

See Chinese characters and Chinese character radicals for more information on how these radicals are used in written Chinese.

The 214 Kangxi radicals are encoded in the Unicode U+2F00–2FDF range.

Kangxi dictionary

The Kangxi dictionary lists a total of 47,035 characters divided among the 214 radicals. There are seven radicals which form more than 1,000 characters each:

• Radical 140 艸 "grass" (1,902)
• Radical 85 水 "water" (1,595)
• Radical 75 木 "tree" (1,369)
• Radical 64 手 "hand" (1,203)
• Radical 30 口 "mouth" (1,146)
• Radical 61 心 "heart" (1,115)
• Radical 142 虫 "insect" (1,067)

The lowest number of characters derived from any radical is five (Radical 138 艮).

Table of radicals

Unicode

These are specific codepoints for the radicals as distinct from the characters consisting of the unaugmented radicals. Thus U+2F00 ⼀ represents the radical no. 1 while U+4E00 一 represents the character yī meaning "one". Additional radicals are found in the CJK Radicals Supplement range (2E80–2EFF). All Kangxi Radicals are duplicates of regular CJK ideographs.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kangxi radicals.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chinese radicals.

• List of Shuowen Jiezi radicals
• List of Unicode radicals
  • Unicode chart – Kangxi Radicals
  • Unicode chart – CJK Radicals Supplement
• List of Xinhua Zidian radicals – 189 radicals
• List of Japanese radicals
• Section headers of a Chinese dictionary

External links

Look up Index:Chinese radical in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Simplified Chinese characters with English definitions, grouped by radicals
• Table of the 214 radicals in the unicode project
• List of 214 Japanese radicals and exceptions to Kangxi, searchable and grouped by stroke number
• Tangorin, search Japanese kanji using the 214 Kangxi radicals (link broken: use the Web Archive.org Wayback Machine copy instead)
• Chinese characters by radical
• List of Radicals, meaning and naming with Japanese.
• Chinese etymology search radicals and receive the meaning as well as illustrations of radicals in history

Sources

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

References