Radical 212

Radical 212, 龍, 龙, or 竜 meaning "dragon" (龍部), 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,^[a] 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 or Long in Sino-Vietnamese

It may also refer to the Dragon as it appears in the Chinese zodiac. It is also a common surname.

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".

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  Shang dynastyOracle bone script
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  Shang dynasty Bronze script
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  Western Zhou oracle script
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  Western Zhou Bronze script
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  Spring and Autumn period bronze script
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  Warring States period bronze script
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  Chuslip and silk script
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  Qin slip script
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  Large seal script character
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  Small seal script character
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  Han dynastyClerical script
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  Qing dynasty Clerical script

• 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