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:
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".
| strokes | character | |
|---|---|---|
| +0 | ||
| +2 | ||
| +3 | ||
| +4 | ||
| +5 | ||
| +6 | ||
| +16 | ||
| +17 | ||
| +32 | ||
| +48 |