Chinese character radicals

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Chinese characters
Chinese family of scripts Written Chinese Kanji Hanja Chữ Hán
Historical forms and styles Neolithic symbols in China Oracle bone Bronze Seal (Bird-worm Large Small) Clerical Cursive Semi-cursive Regular Flat brush Typefaces Fangsong Ming Sans-serif
Properties and classification Components Strokes (order) Radical
Collation and standards Character-form standards Jiu zixing Xin zixing Kangxi Dictionary forms (1716) General Standard Chinese Characters (mainland China, 2013) Graphemes of Commonly-used Chinese characters (Hong Kong, 2007) Standard Form of National Characters (Taiwan, 1982) Grapheme-usage standards General Standard Characters (PRC, 2013) Jōyō kanji (Japan, 2010) Other standards Standardized Forms of Words with Variant Forms (PRC, 2002) Nan Min Recommended Characters (Taiwan, 2009) Previous standards Commonly-used Characters (PRC, 1988) Tōyō kanji (Japan, 1946)
Reforms China Clerical reforms Traditional characters Simplified characters (first round second round) Debate Japan Kyūjitai Shinjitai Ryakuji Korea Yakja Singapore Table of Simplified Characters
Homographs and readings Literary and colloquial readings
Variants Graphemic variants Zetian characters
Derived systems Slavonic transcription Nüshu Kana ( Man'yōgana Hiragana Katakana ) Jurchen script Khitan ( Large Small ) Idu script Bopomofo Sawndip Chữ Nôm
Transliteration of Chinese
v t e

A Chinese radical (Chinese: 部首; pinyin: bùshǒu; lit. 'section header') or indexing component is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. This component is often a semantic indicator similar to a morpheme, though sometimes it may be a phonetic component or even an artificially extracted portion of the character. In some cases the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in character meaning or pronunciation over time.

The English term "radical" is based on an analogy between the structure of characters and inflection of words in European languages.^[a] Radicals are also sometimes called "classifiers", but this name is more commonly applied to grammatical classifiers (measure words).^[2]

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