攴

{| style="border: 2px solid #33424F; width: min(100%, 380px); float: left;" darkstyle="border-color: #48484a;"
|-
| colspan="4" style="text-align: center; font-size: 5em; padding: 26px 0; line-height: 1; color: #33424F;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | 攴
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Meaning
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | to rap; to tap lightly
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Radical
| style="padding: 6px 10px; width: 23%; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | 攴 + 0
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Strokes
| style="padding: 6px 10px; width: 23%; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | 4
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Composition
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | ⿱卜又
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Formation
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Ideogrammic (disputed)
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Unicode
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | U+6534
|-
| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Mandarin ]'''"|color="var(--wiki-color)"|style="width: 100%;"}}
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Pinyin
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | pū
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Zhuyin
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | ㄆㄨ
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Radical name
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 缺支 (quēzhī)
{{Endcollapse}}
|-
| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Cantonese ]'''"|color="var(--wiki-color)"|style="width: 100%;"}}
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Jyutping
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | pok3
{{Endcollapse}}
|-
| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Japanese ]'''"|color="var(--wiki-color)"|style="width: 100%;"}}
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | On'yomi
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | ボク (boku), ホク (hoku)
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Radical name
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | とまた (tomata), ぼくづくり (bokuzukuri)
{{Endcollapse}}
|-
| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Korean ]'''"|color="var(--wiki-color)"|style="width: 100%;"}}
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Reading
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 복 (bok)
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Eumhun
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 칠 (chil) 복 — "to strike"
|-
! style="color: #33424F; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: var(--wiki-color);" | Radical name
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 칠복부 (chilbokbu)
{{Endcollapse}}
|}

{| style="border: 1px solid #33424F; text-align: center; width: min(100%, 380px); float: right;" darkstyle="border-color: #48484a;"
|-
| colspan="3" style="background-color: #33424F; color: #fff; padding: 6px 10px; font-weight: bold;" | Radical 66 across code points
|-
! style="background-color: #f8f9fa; padding: 6px 14px; text-align: left;" darkstyle="background-color: var(--wiki-surface);" | Full form
| style="padding: 2px 14px; font-size: 2em;" | 攴
| style="padding: 2px 14px; color: #666;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #666 55%, #f5f5f7);" | U+6534
|-
! style="background-color: #f8f9fa; padding: 6px 14px; text-align: left;" darkstyle="background-color: var(--wiki-surface);" | Component form
| style="padding: 2px 14px; font-size: 2em;" | 攵
| style="padding: 2px 14px; color: #666;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #666 55%, #f5f5f7);" | U+6535
|-
! style="background-color: #f8f9fa; padding: 6px 14px; text-align: left;" darkstyle="background-color: var(--wiki-surface);" | Kangxi radical
| style="padding: 2px 14px; font-size: 2em;" | ⽁
| style="padding: 2px 14px; color: #666;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #666 55%, #f5f5f7);" | U+2F41
|-
! style="background-color: #f8f9fa; padding: 6px 14px; text-align: left;" darkstyle="background-color: var(--wiki-surface);" | CJK radical
| style="padding: 2px 14px; font-size: 2em;" | ⺙
| style="padding: 2px 14px; color: #666;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #666 55%, #f5f5f7);" | U+2E99
|-
| colspan="3" style="padding: 4px 14px; font-size: 0.85em; color: #666; text-align: left;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #666 55%, #f5f5f7);" | The lower two are for radical charts, not for writing words.
|}

<div style="clear: both;"></div>

'''攴''' (pronounced ''pū'' in Mandarin) is a Chinese character meaning to rap or strike lightly. It is one of the most consequential characters in the writing system that almost nobody ever writes, because it stopped being used as a word more than two thousand years ago and survives instead as a building block inside several hundred other characters.

Its picture is a hand holding a stick. Wherever it appears as a component, it marks the character as describing a deliberate action done to something — hitting it, driving it, compelling it, governing it. Educating a child, attacking a city, herding cattle, and gathering a harvest are all written with this element, which says something about how the ancient Chinese understood each of those activities.

In everyday writing the character is almost always reshaped into a shorter form, [[攵]], which is the version readers actually encounter. 攴 itself is now confined to dictionaries, a handful of characters that kept the older shape, and the radical charts at the front of reference books.

= Meaning =

The oldest recorded sense of 攴 is a light blow. The ''[[Shuowen Jiezi]]'' defines it in two words — 小擊也, "a small strike" — and [[Duan Yucai]]'s commentary sharpens the point, noting that the ordinary word for striking, 擊, is defined using 攴 itself, so the two are near-synonyms with 攴 the gentler of the pair.

Oracle bone inscriptions show the word in concrete agricultural use. One divination record from the Shang period reads 攴[[禾]], "to beat the grain" — that is, threshing, knocking the kernels loose from the stalk with a flail. The same action is still performed the same way in parts of the world today.

攴 is also the original written form of [[扑]], the later and now standard character for striking or flogging. Once 扑 existed, 攴 was left with nothing to do as an independent word, and it withdrew into its role as a component. This is a common life cycle for early characters: the word survives, the graph gets replaced, and the original becomes a piece of machinery inside other graphs.

= Character structure =

攴 is written [[卜]] above [[又]] — but both of those identifications are conveniences of the modern printed shape rather than descriptions of what the character originally drew.

* '''Lower element''': 又, a picture of a right hand. This part is stable and uncontroversial.
* '''Upper element''': printed today as 卜, the divination character. In the [[Oracle bone script|oracle bone]] forms it is not 卜 at all, but a drawing of a forked stick or a whip — a thing held, with no phonetic role.

== A disputed analysis ==

The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' analyzes 攴 as a phono-semantic compound: 小擊也。从又卜聲 — "a small strike; follows 又, with 卜 as the sound." [[Xu Shen]] is reading the Han-dynasty printed shape, in which the upper element had already flattened into something indistinguishable from 卜.

Modern paleography disagrees. The oracle bone and bronze forms show a hand below and an implement above, combining into the meaning directly, with no sound element involved — an ideogrammic compound. The resemblance to 卜 is the result of graphic corruption during the [[Clerical script|clerical script]] reform, not evidence of a phonetic.

This makes 攴 a useful counterexample to have alongside [[收]], where the ''Shuowen'' analysis holds up perfectly well under modern reconstruction. Xu Shen was working eight centuries after the oracle bones were buried and had no access to them. His analyses are the indispensable starting point and are usually right, but they are testable rather than final, and on characters whose shapes shifted early he is sometimes reading a corruption as a design.

= As a radical =

攴 is Kangxi radical 66. The ''Shuowen'' groups 76 characters under it; the ''[[Kangxi Dictionary]]'' lists roughly 296.

The semantic thread running through them is force applied on purpose. The radical does not mean violence so much as agency — someone doing something to something else, often with an implement, usually with authority behind it:

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #33424F33;"
|-
! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Character !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Sense !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | What is being acted on
|-
| 攻 || to attack || an enemy or a problem
|-
| 政 || government || the governed
|-
| 教 || to teach || a pupil
|-
| 牧 || to herd || livestock
|-
| 改 || to correct, to change || a fault
|-
| 敗 || to defeat, to ruin || an opponent or an object
|-
| [[收]] || to gather in || a crop, a debt, a prisoner
|}

That [[教]] "to teach" and [[政]] "government" sit in the same family as [[攻]] "to attack" is a much-repeated observation in Chinese character pedagogy, usually accompanied by the remark that ancient instruction came with a rod. The pairing is real, though it is worth treating the moral gloss as commentary rather than as documented history.

== The component form [[攵]] ==

When 攴 appears inside another character it is nearly always written [[攵]], a four-stroke shape produced during the clerical script reform for the simple reason that it is faster to write. Only a small number of characters preserve the original shape, among them [[敲]] and [[寇]].

The two forms are the same radical and are indexed together in every dictionary. See [[攵]] for the component form and the strikingly different names it has acquired in each country.

== Unicode encoding ==

Radical 66 occupies four separate Unicode code points, which is a common source of confusion when copying characters out of reference material.

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #33424F33;"
|-
! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Code point !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Glyph !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Name !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Purpose
|-
| U+6534 || 攴 || CJK Unified Ideograph-6534 || The character itself, for use in text
|-
| U+6535 || 攵 || CJK Unified Ideograph-6535 || The component form, also for use in text
|-
| U+2F41 || ⽁ || Kangxi Radical Rap || Radical charts and indexes only
|-
| U+2E99 || ⺙ || CJK Radical Rap || Radical charts and indexes only
|}

The lower two exist so that a radical table can be typeset as a table of radicals rather than as ordinary characters. They should never appear in running text.

The two behave differently under normalization, which is the trap. U+2F41 carries a compatibility decomposition to U+6534, so NFKC and NFKD convert it to 攴 while NFC and NFD leave it alone. U+2E99 has no decomposition at all, so no normalization form will ever turn it into 攵. Text copied out of a radical chart can therefore look correct and fail every search and comparison against it.

= Pronunciation =

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #33424F33;"
|-
! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Language !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Reading !! style="background-color: #33424F; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Notes
|-
| Mandarin Chinese || ''pū'' || First tone; the character is not used as a word in modern Chinese
|-
| Cantonese || ''pok3'' || A variant reading ''bok1'' is also recorded
|-
| Japanese (on'yomi) || ''boku'' (ボク), ''hoku'' (ホク) || The radical name ぼくづくり derives from the first of these
|-
| Korean || ''bok'' (복) || Taught with the gloss 칠 복 (''chil bok''), "the ''bok'' that means to strike"
|}

The ''Shuowen'' records the [[Middle Chinese]] reading with the ''fanqie'' spelling 普木切, and Duan Yucai assigns it to the third [[Old Chinese]] rhyme group.

= Further reading =

This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — the full sequence of oracle bone and bronze forms, the complete roster of characters filed under the radical, and the layered classical commentaries — can consult the following:

* [https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/ Unicode Standard Annex #38] — the authoritative definition of the Unihan database fields used throughout this article
* [https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/ Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants] — Taiwan Ministry of Education; searchable, with historical variant forms and source documents for each character
* [https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E6%94%B4 攴 on Zdic] — the ''Shuowen'' text with Duan Yucai's commentary, plus dialectal readings
* [http://c.obsky.com/shuowen/zi-25908.html 攴 in the Shuowen Jiezi] — the entry with the Xu Xuan, Xu Kai, and Duan Yucai layers side by side

= See also =

* [[Chinese characters]]
* [[Kangxi radicals]]
* [[Radical (Chinese characters)]]