Look up any Chinese character to see its radical, stroke count, and related characters. Browse all 214 Kangxi radicals.
Every Chinese character is built from one or more radicals (部首, bùshǒu). The Kangxi radical system organizes all Chinese characters under 214 radicals, named after the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary commissioned by Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty. Each radical carries its own meaning, and understanding radicals helps learners decode unfamiliar characters by recognizing familiar components.
For example, characters containing the water radical 氵(radical #85, from 水) often relate to liquids or water: 河 (river), 湖 (lake), 海 (sea), 洗 (wash). The radical tells you the semantic category, while other components may hint at pronunciation.
Stroke count (笔画, bǐhuà) is the total number of individual brush strokes needed to write a character. It is one of the primary ways to look up characters in traditional dictionaries: first find the radical, then count the remaining strokes (residual strokes) to locate the character within that radical's section. This tool shows both the total stroke count and the residual strokes after subtracting the radical, mirroring how paper dictionaries are organized.
Want to check the difficulty level of a full passage? Try our Chinese Text Analyzer to see HSK vocabulary distribution and readability scores for any Chinese text.
Robert Fried is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Chinese Language Institute (CLI), a center for Chinese language and cultural studies in Guilin, China, that he established in 2009. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School and an MA in China Studies from the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated summa cum laude from Virginia Tech. Robert achieved Superior on ACTFL's Mandarin Oral Proficiency Interview and has spent over 17 years building CLI into a leading immersion program serving students from more than 50 countries.