Radical 140 or radical grass () meaning "grass" is one of 29 of the 214
Kangxi radicals that are composed of 6
strokes
A stroke is a medical condition in which poor blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and hemorrhagic, due to bleeding. Both cause parts of the brain to stop funct ...
. It transforms into when appearing at the top of a character or component. In the ''
Kangxi Dictionary'' and in modern standard Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, (with two horizontal strokes) consists of four strokes, while in Simplified Chinese and modern Japanese, (with a continuous horizontal stroke) consists of three strokes.
In the ''
Kangxi Dictionary'' there are 1902 characters (out of 40,000) found under this
radical, making it the most commonly used radical.
, the upper component form of , is the 30th indexing component in the ''
Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components'' predominantly adopted by
Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in
mainland China
"Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater China. ...
, while is listed as its associated indexing component.
Evolution
File:艸-seal.svg, Small seal script character
Derived characters
Variant forms
This radical character is written differently in different languages. Traditionally, breaking the horizontal stroke in 艹 is optional in both printing and written forms. The ''
Kangxi Dictionary'' adopted the four-stroke form .
In today's Simplified Chinese, only the three-stroke form is used; The four-stroke form is treated as an obsolete typeface form after the adoption of ''
xin zixing
The xin zixing () is a standardized form of Chinese character set in mainland China based on the 1964 "List of character forms of Common Chinese characters for Publishing" () as compared to ''jiu zixing'' (). The standard is based on regular script ...
''. In modern Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, the four-stroke form is standard, while the three-stroke form is still overwhelmingly preferred in publications.
In Japanese, only the three-stroke form is used for ''
jōyō kanji'' (commonly used Chinese characters); the three-stroke form is recommended for ''
hyōgai kanji'', while the four-stroke form is listed as an acceptable "design difference" in ''Hyōgai Kanji Jitaihyō'' () and
JIS X 0208
JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...
.
In addition, is derived from the
cursive form of 艹.
艹-torder.gif, Standard stroke order in Taiwan Chinese
艹-order.gif, Stroke order in Simplified Chinese and Japanese
References
* KangXi:
page 1017 character 1
* Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 30638
* Dae Jaweon: page 1475, character 6
* Hanyu Da Zidian: volume 5, page 3172, character 1
Unihan data for U+8278
{{Simplified Chinese radicals
140
030