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Chinese radicals



Chinese characters can be decomposed into basic components called radicals. The list of these radicals is a rough equivalent of a Chinese "alphabet". There exists several table of radicals, each of them having a different number of radicals. However, the most commonly accepted table of radicals is composed of 214 entries.

Radicals are important since they allow the classification in dictionary of every Chinese character. In a dictionary, a character is sorted according to the radical it is composed of. All the characters classified under the same radical are in turn sorted on the basis of the number of additional strokes they contain. Radicals are themselves sorted by the number of strokes they contain.

Some radicals are independant characters, some others can t be used alone but always in combination with other radicals or characters. Some radicals have more than one form. For instance, the "man" radical exists under the following two forms: