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A radical (from Latin radix, meaning "root") is a basic identifiable
component of every Chinese character, namely, of the Chinese Hanzi, the Japanese Kanji, and the Korean
Hanja. The name is an English translation of the characters 部首 (bù
shǒu in Chinese; bushu in Japanese; busu in Korean), literally meaning "partial head", where "head" means "the most
important (part)".
Radicals are used in Chinese dictionaries, Kanji-Japanese dictionaries, and Hanja-Korean dictionaries to order characters in sets by the number of strokes they contain.
Full characters are ordered according to their initial radicals, then these are subcategorised by their total number of strokes.
This principle of categorisation is exploited by everybody who must learn to write Han characters: The vast number of Chinese characters can be much more easily memorized if they are mentally decomposed into their constituent radicals.
Though radicals are widely accepted as a method to categorize Chinese characters and to locate a certain character in a dictionary, there is no universal agreement about either the exact number of radicals, or the set of radicals. Not to mention which set of radicals to use for certain characters. The increased use of simplified characters makes the situation even more complicated.
Fortunately, some famous dictionaries have provided us with some de facto standards.
The Late Han dictionary Shuowen Jiezi by Xu Shen (许慎) (d.147 AD) is the first to thoroughly describe the characters and their radicals. Xu attributed all characters to 540 radicals.
The early dictionaries did not order the characters for each radical by the number of strokes. This ordering was introduced by the Late Ming dictionary 字彙 (published around 1615). It also reduced the number of radicals to 214.
The most influential authority for radical-stroke information is the eighteenth-century Kangxi Dictionary (1716), using the 214 radicals from 字彙. Nowadays, the 214 Kangxi radicals remain the best known.
The count of commonly used radicals, however, is probably less. The Oxford Concise English-Chinese Dictionary, for example, has 189.
With the adoption of simplified characters, a lot of characters are difficult to classify under the 214 Kangxi radicals. As a result, various modern radical sets have been introduced. None, however, are in general use.
The 214 Kangxi radicals serve as a base for various computer encoding systems. For instance, The Unicode radical-stroke charts are based on the Kangxi radicals.
The commonly used system, known as the "radical-and-stroke-count" method, makes use of the fact that Chinese characters (total number very approximately 5,000-50,000) are assembled from some 1,000-2,000 subcomponents. Of those subcomponents a few hundred are designated as "radicals" for indexing purposes. The most commonly encountered radicals are very basic ideograms, representing simple concepts like "man (人)," "sun (日)," or "tree (木)". The steps involved in looking up a character are:
For example, consider the character 信 ("man" standing next to his "words" (mouth with sound)) meaning truth, faith, fidelity, sincerity, trust, confidence, reliance, or devotion. The index radical here is "man" (人) and there are 7 additional strokes in the remaining portion (言). To look this one up finds the radical for "man" in the dictionary (most dictionaries will have an index page to help with this step) and then passes through 1 additional stroke, 2 additional strokes, etc. until one finds entries for 7 additional strokes. If the radical chosen by the user matches the radical used by the dictionary compiler (not a problem in this simple example, but it can be tricky), and if both user and dictionary compiler count strokes the same way (occasionally a problem), the entry will be found.
As a general rule of thumb, radicals in the left, top and surrounding portion of a character (in that order) are likely to be used as index radicals. For example, 信 is typically indexed under the left-hand radical 人 instead of the right-hand 言, and 套 is typically indexed under the top 大 instead of the bottom 長. There are, however, considerable ideosyncracies between different dictionaries.
In the multi-radical method [1] (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?1R), a relatively new development enabled by computing technology, the user can select all of a character's radicals from a table and the computer will present a list of matching characters. This eliminates the guesswork of choosing the correct index radical and calculating the correct stroke count, and cuts down searching time significantly.
The following is a list of radicals in order of the number of strokes. The list of radicals is based on the Radical-Stroke Index of the Unihan Database (http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihanrsindex.html). Both simplified and traditional forms are given (e.g. 马/馬). Some radicals widely adopted in modern dictionaries (e.g. 刂) are included as well. Different forms of a radical are provided in parentheses (e.g. 乙(乚乛)).
Whilst the list of radicals is correct, do not assume that the character examples given below belong to these radical. The example characters show elements where these radicals appear only. For instance, the character 套 is shown under the eight stroke radical 長 (long) however, it is actually under the three stroke radical 大 (big). Also, the character 生 is shown below as belonging to the one stroke radical 丿 slash, but the character 生 is itself also a radical.
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