Radical 212

Chinese character radical

龍

← 211

Radical 212 (U+2FD3)

213 →

龍 (U+9F8D) "dragon"

Pronunciations

Pinyin:

lóng

Bopomofo:

ㄌㄨㄥˊ

Wade–Giles:

lung2

Cantonese Yale:

lung4

Jyutping:

lung4

Japanese Kana:

リョー・リュー ryō, ryū
たつ tatsu

Sino-Korean:

룡 ryong

Names

Japanese name(s):

竜 ryū

Hangul:

용 yong

Stroke order animation

Radical 212, 龍, 龙, or 竜 meaning "dragon", is one of the two of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 16 strokes. The character arose as a stylized drawing of a Chinese dragon,^[1] and refers to a version of the dragon in each East Asian culture:

Chinese dragon, Lóng in Chinese
Japanese dragon, Ryū or Tatsu in Japanese
Korean dragon, Ryong or Yong in Korean
Vietnamese dragon, Rồng in Vietnamese

It may also refer to the Dragon as it appears in the Chinese zodiac.

In the Kangxi Dictionary 14 characters (out of 40,000) are under this radical.

It occurs as a phonetic complement in some fairly common Chinese characters, for example 聾 = "deaf", which is composed of 龍 "dragon" and the "ear" 耳 radical, "a word with meaning related to ears and pronounced similarly to 龍": "dragon gives sound, ear gives meaning".

Characters with Radical 212

strokes	character
without additional strokes	龍
2 additional strokes	龎
3 additional strokes	龏龐
4 additional strokes	龑
5 additional strokes	龒
6 additional strokes	龓龔龕
16 additional strokes	龖
17 additional strokes	龗
32 additional strokes	龘
48 additional strokes	𪚥

Literature

Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram : the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-774-1.
Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5619-0204-2