Chinese radicals: the chart of all 214 and the most common ones with examples

October 13, 2026 · 12 min read

Chinese radicals are the recurring parts that thousands of characters are built from; the main such part of a character is called its radical. Radicals turn a character from a jumble of lines into a structure you can take apart and remember. This article explains what radicals are, gives the twenty most common ones with words and audio, and ends with the full chart of all 214 radicals with pinyin and meanings.

What is a Chinese radical?

A radical is the part of a character that a dictionary files it under. Before dictionaries were ordered by pinyin, this is how you looked a character up: you found its radical, counted the remaining strokes and opened the right section. Every character has exactly one radical.

For a learner, something else matters more: the radical often hints at what the word is about. Characters with the "water" radical have to do with liquids, those with the "speech" radical with talking, and those with the "mouth" radical with eating and sounds.

How many radicals are there?

The traditional system has 214: that's how many the Kangxi Dictionary used, compiled in the early 18th century. This chart of radicals is still in use today, and you'll find it at the end of the article. The modern standard for simplified characters has 201. You don't need to learn them all in a row: two dozen of the most common ones appear in most beginner words.

Radical plus a second part: meaning and sound

Most characters are made of two parts. One, the radical, hints at the meaning; the other gives a clue to the pronunciation. In 妈 from the word 妈妈 māma — mom the radical on the left is 女 "woman", and on the right is 马, 马 mǎ — horse. The horse has nothing to do with it: it's only there to show that the character is read ma.

Why a radical can look different

Many radicals have two forms: the full one when the character stands alone, and a squeezed one inside another character. "Person" on its own is 人, and on the side of a character it's 亻. "Water" is 水 and 氵 (Chinese call this one "three dots of water"), "speech" is 言 and 讠, "hand" is 手 and 扌. In the list of common radicals, the form you'll see inside characters comes first.

The 20 most common radicals

The example words are from HSK 1. Tap a word to hear it and find the radical in it.

How to learn the radicals

• Not row by row from the chart. A list of 214 lines is forgotten within a week. A radical sticks when you recognise it in a word you already know; the chart is there for reference.
• Take apart every new character. Each time you meet a character, find a part you know in it. After a month, most new characters will be made of parts you've seen before.
• Write the radical in its proper turn. Strokes have an order, and the radical is written when its turn comes. The printable handwriting sheets show the stroke order step by step.

All the characters of the first level are in the HSK 1 word list. And why Chinese has no alphabet, and how many characters you need to read, is in the article on the Chinese alphabet.

Chart of the 214 Chinese radicals

This is the full chart of the Kangxi radicals. The order and numbers are the standard ones: radicals go by stroke count, from one to seventeen, and dictionaries refer to them by these numbers. The "Variant" column gives the form a radical takes inside a character (亻, 氵, 扌) or its simplified form (见, 门, 马).

A few caveats. Some radicals are words in their own right (人, 水, 山), others are only graphic elements: the readings of 丨, 宀 or 疒 are conventional, used to name the radical out loud, and they sometimes differ between dictionaries. The meanings are also brief, based on the original sense of the character. The radicals 邑 and 阜 look the same inside a character, 阝, and you tell them apart by position: "city" stands on the right, "mound" on the left.

How to use the radical chart

When you meet an unfamiliar character, find its most recognisable part, count its strokes and go to that row: "3 strokes", "4 strokes". That tells you what the radical is called and what topic it hints at. There's no need to memorise all 214 in order: only some of them work constantly in ordinary texts, and you may not meet rare ones like 龠 in years of study.

To see radicals at work, open the common characters with meanings and take a few familiar ones apart. The best place to write radicals is the handwriting sheets, which show the stroke order. And the general rules (top to bottom, left to right) are in the article on how to write Chinese characters.