Find a Chinese character by its parts

Matches

Pick one or more components below. Characters containing all of them appear here.

Components are grouped by how many strokes they take to write. The ones with a blue outline are radicals, and picking one links you to its own reference page — 93 of the 100 radicals have a square here. The single-stroke ones do not, on purpose — the lone horizontal stroke 一 is inside almost every character in the language, so it filters nothing.

Component search and handwriting search are the two features most Chinese dictionary sites put behind a sign-in once you get past the commonest thousand characters — which is exactly the point at which you start meeting characters you cannot type. There is no account on this site to sign in to, and no tier above the one you are using. All 3,616 characters are searchable on every visit.

Nothing you press leaves the page either. The matching is arithmetic running in your browser against one file of component lists it downloads once; there is no search endpoint behind this page, nothing appears in the address bar, and no record is kept of what you looked up. That is the same rule this site follows for handwriting lookup, site search and stroke-order animations, whose character data is served from here rather than from a third-party CDN so that no one else learns which characters you are studying.

This is worth knowing before you rely on it, because it explains the gaps. Nobody typed in a list of which character contains which part. Every character on this site is drawn from open stroke data that records, for each character, the strokes that make up its radical. Splitting a character at that line gives its two halves; each half is then identified by its shape, compared against the way that component is written on its own, and the halves are split again in turn. That is how 想 comes out as 心 over 相, and 相 as 木 beside 目.

Where the shape is not a clear enough match, the part is left out rather than guessed at. Some components change a lot when they move into a character — 牛 flattens and its last stroke turns upward inside 物, 特 and 牧 — and a loose match starts naming those parts wrongly, which is far worse here than naming nothing: a wrong component looks exactly like a right one, and you would have no way of telling. So a handful of squeezed forms are missing, on purpose.

The measure of it: of the characters the 100 radical pages list as their own examples — a list written by hand, quite separately from this — the index finds about four in five. The radicals hub is the place to go for the fifth: it lists every radical's characters directly, and the two together cover much more than either alone.

Two components beat one by a very long way, and a component plus a stroke count usually beats two. Some worked examples:

If a component you press dims the ones you were about to press next, that is the page telling you the combination does not exist — press it again to undo, and try the other piece.

Component search is the fastest route when you can name a piece of the character but could not draw the whole thing. The others are better in different corners:

Learning twenty or thirty of these parts is the single change that makes Chinese characters stop looking random — see the most common radicals for the ones that repay it fastest.

How do I find a Chinese character when I only know its parts?

Choose the parts. A Chinese character is built from a small number of repeating pieces, and most learners can name one or two of them long before they can pronounce the character — "it has the water radical on the left and 青 on the right". Press those two components here and you get 清. This page indexes 508 components across 3,616 characters, free and without an account.

Do I need to know which part is the radical?

No, and that is the difference between this and a paper radical index. A printed dictionary makes you identify the one official radical and count its strokes before it will help you. Here every part is searchable on the same terms: press whichever piece you recognise, in any order, and add a second only if the list is too long.

Why is the character I am looking at missing?

Usually because one of its parts is drawn differently inside a character than it is on its own. Components are matched by shape, from the stroke data itself, and a few squeeze so much when they move to the left of a character that the match is not certain enough to claim — 牛 inside 物 is the clearest example. Nothing is guessed: a part that cannot be identified is left out rather than assigned to whichever component came closest. Remove the least distinctive component you picked, or draw the character instead.

Does it work with traditional characters?

Yes. Both scripts are indexed, because someone reading a menu in Taipei or a sign in Hong Kong has no way of knowing which script they are looking at. A traditional character opens the dictionary entry for its simplified counterpart, where both spellings are shown; the Simplified ↔ Traditional converter handles whole passages.

Is anything I search here recorded?

No. The matching runs inside your browser against one file of component lists downloaded when the page loads, so the components you press are never sent anywhere — there is no search endpoint behind this page at all, nothing appears in the address bar, and nothing is stored. See the privacy policy for what this site does and does not collect.

Do I need an account?

No. There are no accounts on this site and no per-character limit. Other Chinese dictionary sites offer component search free only for the commonest thousand characters and ask you to sign in beyond that; every character indexed here is free every time.

• Radicals Hub — 101 pages, one per component: what it depicts, where it sits and the characters built from it
• Draw a Character to Look It Up — the other half of "I cannot type it", for when you can see the whole shape
• Chinese Dictionary — the full entry behind every character found here
• Stroke Order Animator — watch any character written stroke by stroke
• The Most Common Chinese Radicals — the twenty or thirty parts worth learning first
• Pinyin Annotator — pinyin above every character of a passage you can paste
• 田字格 Practice Sheets — printable grids for writing a character out by hand