艸
← 139 Radical 140 (U+2F8B) 141 →
艸 (U+8278) "grass"
Pronunciations
Pinyin:	cǎo
Bopomofo:	ㄘㄠˇ
Gwoyeu Romatzyh:	tsao
Wade–Giles:	tsʻao3
Cantonese Yale:	chóu
Jyutping:	cou2
JapaneseKana:	ソウ sō (on'yomi) くさ kusa (kun'yomi)
Sino-Korean:	초 cho
Hán-Việt:	thảo
Names
Chinese name(s):	(艹) 草字頭/草字头 cǎozìtóu
Japanese name(s):	草/くさ kusa (艹) 草冠/くさかんむり kusakanmuri
Hangul:	풀 pul
Stroke order animation

Radical 140 orradical grass (艸部) meaning"grass" is one of 29 of the 214Kangxi radicals that are composed of 6strokes. It transforms into艹 when appearing at the top of a character or component. In theKangxi Dictionary and in modern standard Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau,艹 (with two horizontal strokes) consists of four strokes, while in Simplified Chinese and modern Japanese,艹 (with a continuous horizontal stroke) consists of three strokes.

In theKangxi Dictionary there are 1902 characters (out of 40,000) found under thisradical, making it the most commonly used radical.

艹, the upper component form of艸, is the 30th indexing component in theTable of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted bySimplified Chinese dictionaries published inmainland China, while艸 is listed as its associated indexing component.

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  Small seal script character

This radical character is written differently in different languages. Traditionally, breaking the horizontal stroke in 艹 is optional in both printing and written forms. TheKangxi Dictionary adopted the four-stroke form⺿.

In today's Simplified Chinese, only the three-stroke form艹 is used; The four-stroke form⺿ is treated as an obsolete typeface form after the adoption ofxin zixing. In modern Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, the four-stroke form⺿ is standard, while the three-stroke form is still overwhelmingly preferred in publications.

In Japanese, only the three-stroke form is used forjōyō kanji (commonly used Chinese characters); the three-stroke form is recommended forhyōgai kanji, while the four-stroke form is listed as an acceptable "design difference" inHyōgai Kanji Jitaihyō (表外漢字字体表) andJIS X 0208.

In addition,䒑 is derived from thecursive form of 艹.

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  Standard stroke order in Taiwan Chinese
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  Stroke order in Simplified Chinese and Japanese

The radical is also used as an independentChinese character. It is one of thekyōiku kanji or kanji taught in elementary school inJapan.^[1] It is a first grade kanji.^[1]

Wikimedia Commons has media related toRadical 140.

• KangXi:page 1017, character 1
• Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 30638
• Dae Jaweon: page 1475, character 6
• Hanyu Da Zidian: volume 5, page 3172, character 1
• Unihan data for U+8278

• Kyōiku kanji
• Kangxi radicals
• Simplified Chinese radicals

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Chinese-language text
• Articles containing Japanese-language text
• Commons category link is on Wikidata