Chinese Radicals Chart: All 214 Radicals with Meanings

Chinese radicals (部首, bùshǒu) are the components that dictionaries use to sort characters, and most of them hint at a character’s meaning. 氵 (water) runs down the left of 河 (river), 洗 (wash) and 海 (sea); 口 (mouth) sits beside 吃 (eat), 喝 (drink) and 叫 (call). This chart lists all 214 traditional radicals with their pinyin, meaning, stroke count, simplified form, audio and the most common characters that use them. Type any character into the box to find its radical.

All 214 Radicals

Each card shows the radical’s number, its traditional form, its simplified form where that’s different (in blue), the shapes it takes inside characters (in grey, such as 氵 for 水), its pinyin and its usual English name, with up to three common characters that use it (hover or tap one for its meaning). The number in the corner is the radical’s place in the traditional order, which is the order most dictionaries and learning materials use. Radicals marked “rare” aren’t used by any of the 3,000 most common characters.

The Radicals You’ll Meet Most, and Their Names

Many radicals change shape depending on where they sit in a character. 水 (water) becomes 氵 on the left, and 手 (hand) becomes 扌. Chinese speakers name these forms by their shape and position, so when a teacher spells out a character, you’ll hear things like “三点水的河”, the 河 with the three-dots-of-water radical. These are the ones you’ll meet most often:

How to Use Radicals

• To guess a meaning. The radical usually tells you the area of meaning: 讠 (speech) in 说 (say), 话 (words) and 语 (language); 扌 (hand) in 打 (hit), 拿 (hold) and 找 (look for). It’s a hint, not a rule, because many characters have drifted far from their radical’s meaning.
• To guess a sound. In most characters, the part that isn’t the radical hints at the pronunciation: 妈 (mā), 吗 (ma) and 骂 (mà) all borrow their sound from 马 (mǎ). Learning radicals helps you see where the meaning part ends and the sound part begins.
• To remember a character. 休 (rest) is a person, 亻, next to a tree, 木. Breaking a character into pieces you already know is much easier than memorising its strokes.
• To look a character up. Paper dictionaries sort by radical, then by the number of extra strokes. On a phone, you can draw the character or type its pinyin instead, but knowing the radical still helps when you can’t read it.

You don’t need to learn all 214. The fifty most used radicals are the radicals of three quarters of the 3,000 most common characters, and the top hundred cover more than 90%; switch the chart to “Most used first” to see them. Our guide to radicals in Chinese explains how to learn them, and how to learn Chinese characters shows where they fit in. The pinyin chart has audio for every syllable.

Radicals help most when you meet characters in real words and sentences. Mandarin Mosaic teaches characters inside sentences with one new word each, so the radicals you know keep turning up in new combinations.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Chinese radicals are there?

The traditional list has 214, set by the Kangxi Dictionary in 1716, and it’s the one this chart uses. Dictionaries published in mainland China since 2009 follow an official list of 201 radicals, which merges a few, but most learners’ materials and apps still number radicals by the Kangxi list.

What is the most common Chinese radical?

Counted across the 3,000 most common characters, 手 (hand), usually written 扌, is the most used: 163 of them have it as their radical. Close behind are 口 (mouth, 161) and 水 (water, usually 氵, 156), then 人 (person, usually 亻, 127) and 木 (tree, 121).

Is 氵 a radical?

Yes. 氵 is the form that radical 85, 水 (water), takes on the left of a character, as in 河, 洗 and 没. Chinese speakers call it 三点水 (sāndiǎnshuǐ), “three dots of water”.

What is the difference between a radical and a component?

A component is any part of a character. The radical is the one component a dictionary files the character under, usually the one that carries the meaning. 妈 has two components, 女 and 马; 女 is its radical.

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