Chinese character radicals

Uncommon card · No. 195615

A radical (Chinese: 部首; pinyin: bùshǒu; lit. 'section header'), or indexing component, is a visually prominent component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. The radical for a character is typically a semantic component, but it can also be another structural component or an artificially extracted portion of the character. In some cases, the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in the meaning or pronunciation of the character over time. The use of the English term radical is based on an analogy between the structure of Chinese characters and the inflection of words in European languages. Radicals are also sometimes called classifiers, but this name is more commonly applied to the grammatical measure words in Chinese.

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