The ''Kangxi'' radicals (), also known as ''Zihui'' radicals, are a set of 214 radicals that were collated in the 18th-century ''

Kangxi Dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' () is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters. Wanting ...

'' to aid categorization of

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

. They are primarily sorted by stroke count. They are the most popular system of radicals for dictionaries that order characters by radical and stroke count. They are encoded in Unicode alongside other

CJK characters In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for graphemes used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, which each include Chinese characters. It can also go by CJKV to include Chữ Nôm, the Chinese-origin lo ...

, under the

block Block or blocked may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Broadcasting * Block programming, the result of a programming strategy in broadcasting * W242BX, a radio station licensed to Greenville, South Carolina, United States known as ''96.3 ...

"Kangxi radicals", while graphical variants are included in the block "CJK Radicals Supplement". Originally introduced in the '' Zihui'' dictionary of 1615, they are more commonly referred to in relation to the 1716 ''Kangxi Dictionary''—''Kangxi'' being the commissioning emperor's

era name A regnal year is a year of the reign of a sovereign, from the Latin 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 rule, a t ...

. The 1915 encyclopedic word dictionary '' Ciyuan'' 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'' (2000). The system of 214 Kangxi radicals is based on the older system of 540 radicals used in the Han-era ''

Shuowen Jiezi The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the ''Erya'' (), the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' contains the ...

''. Since 2009, the Chinese government has promoted a 201-radical system ('' Table of Han Character Radicals'') called the ''

Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components ''The Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components'' () is a lexicography, 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 ...

'', as a national standard for use with simplified characters.

Statistics

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

), and the minimum being 5 (for radical 138 ). The radicals have between one and 17 strokes, with a median of 5 strokes and an average of slightly below 5.7 strokes. The ten radicals with the largest number of derived characters account for 10,665 characters (or 23% of the dictionary). The same ten radicals account for 7,141 out of the 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. During the process called Han unification, the common (shared) characters were identified and named CJK Unified Ideographs. As of Uni ...

block as it was introduced in 1992, as follows:

Modern dictionaries

Modern Chinese dictionaries continue to use the Kangxi radical-stroke order, both in traditional for written

and modern 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. 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 The ''Xinhua Zidian'' (), also as ''Xinhua Dictionary'', is a Chinese language, Chinese-language dictionary published by the Commercial Press. The first edition of ''Xinhua Zidian'' was published in 1957. The latest version is the 12th edition, ...

'', a pocket-sized character dictionary containing about 13,000 characters, uses 189 radicals, later increased to 201 in its tenth edition, to conform to the national standard. 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'' (), also known as the Grand Chinese Dictionary, is the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary. Lexicographically comparable to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', it has Historical linguistics, diachronic coverage of ...

'', the most inclusive available

Chinese dictionary There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have d ...

(1993) has 23,000 head character entries organized by a novel system of 200 radicals.

Table

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. It is the simplest Chinese character in the language due to consisting of only one line. In the '' Kangxi Dictionary'', ther ...

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 t ...

(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 Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

)
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