Radical 12 or radical eight (八部), meaning eight or all, is one of 23 of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of two strokes. "八" is two bent lines that signal divide. Eight is the single-digit number that can be divided by two the greatest number of times.
In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 44 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.
There is a design nuance in different printing typefaces for this radical. In the Kangxi Dictionary and in Korean hanja, there is a short horizontal line at the beginning of the character's second stroke. This short line does not exist in most Simplified Chinese fonts used in mainland China, except for a few cases like the character 八 as in the Emblem of the People's Liberation Army. It exists in most but not all Traditional Chinese fonts. In Japanese typeface, the presence of the short line depends on each typeface's design.
The short horizontal line exists only in printing typeface, not in any handwriting form.
with a short line
without the short line
八
八
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. ISBN0-89659-774-1.
Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN978-7-5619-0204-2
GF 0011-2009 Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components prescribes 201 principle indexing components and 100 associated indexing components (in brackets) used in Simplified Chinese. Not all associated indexing components are listed above.
