Chinese Radicals & Character Finder

What a radical actually is

A radical is the component a dictionary files a character under. It is usually — not always — the part that hints at meaning, while the rest of the character hints at pronunciation. 河, 湖, 洗 and 汗 all carry 氵, the compressed form of 水 “water”, and all four have something to do with water. That is the single highest-leverage pattern in written Chinese: learn one component and a few hundred characters stop being unrelated shapes.

In the HSK word list the most productive radical is 扌, which accounts for 178 characters on its own. The counts on each radical below come from the word list itself, so they tell you which components are worth learning first rather than which ones a classical dictionary happens to list.

Why 245 and not 214

The number you usually see is 214 — the Kangxi radicals, fixed in 1716 and based on traditional character shapes. Simplification changed many of those shapes, and modern simplified dictionaries file characters under the simplified component instead: 讠 rather than 言, 纟 rather than 糸, 饣 rather than 食. This table follows the modern simplified practice, which is why it lists 245 groups. Every count here is computed from the HSK 3.0 word list, so radicals that no HSK character uses simply do not appear.

How to read the table

Characters inside each group are ordered by the HSK level where they first appear, so the ones you meet earliest come first. The coloured edge repeats that level. Characters that are also HSK words on their own link to a full entry with pinyin, meaning, audio and a stroke animation; the rest appear as plain text — they exist only inside longer words. Look any of them up in the stroke order tool to see the component breakdown.