Radical 46

Radical 46 or radical mountain (山部) meaning "mountain" is one of the 31 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals total) composed of three strokes. It is found in the names of mountains generally in east Asia.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 636 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

山 is also the 39th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China.

In Taoist cosmology, 山 (mountain) is the nature component of the bagua diagram 艮 gèn. This diagram corresponds to the I Ching trigram ☶.

Evolution

Sinogram

The radical is also used as an independent Chinese character. It is one of the kyōiku kanji or kanji taught in elementary school in Japan. It is a first grade kanji.

References

Literature

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.
Lunde, Ken (Jan 5, 2009). "Appendix J: Japanese Character Sets" (PDF). CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing (Second ed.). Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-51447-1.