Radical 212

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".

• 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

• Unihan Database - U+9F8D

Look up 龍 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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