禾

{| style="border: 2px solid #6B5307; width: min(100%, 380px);"
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| colspan="4" style="text-align: center; font-size: 5em; padding: 26px 0; line-height: 1; color: #6B5307;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | 禾
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Meaning
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | grain on the stalk; cereal crop
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Radical
| style="padding: 6px 10px; width: 23%; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | 禾 + 0
! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Strokes
| style="padding: 6px 10px; width: 23%; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | 5
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Formation
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Pictogram
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7); border-color: #2c2c2e;" | Unicode
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;" darkstyle="border-color: #2c2c2e;" | U+79BE
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| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Mandarin ]'''"|color="#6B5307"|style="width: 100%;"}}
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Pinyin
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | hé
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Zhuyin
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | ㄏㄜˊ
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Radical name
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 禾字旁 (hézìpáng)
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| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Cantonese ]'''"|color="#6B5307"|style="width: 100%;"}}
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Jyutping
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | wo4
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| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Japanese ]'''"|color="#6B5307"|style="width: 100%;"}}
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | On'yomi
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | カ (ka)
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Kun'yomi
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | いね (ine), のぎ (nogi)
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Radical name
| colspan="3" style="padding: 6px 10px;" | のぎへん (nogihen), いねへん (inehen)
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| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Korean ]'''"|color="#6B5307"|style="width: 100%;"}}
|-
! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; width: 27%; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Reading
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 화 (hwa)
|-
! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Eumhun
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 벼 (byeo) 화 — "rice plant"
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! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Level
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | High school
|-
! style="color: #6B5307; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" darkstyle="color: color-mix(in srgb, #6B5307 55%, #f5f5f7);" | Radical name
| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | 벼화부 (byeohwabu)
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| colspan="4" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Vietnamese ]'''"|color="#6B5307"|style="width: 100%;"}}
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| style="padding: 6px 10px;" | hòa
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'''禾''' (pronounced ''hé'' in Mandarin) is a Chinese character depicting a standing cereal plant. It is Kangxi radical 115, and it supplies the meaning element for most of the vocabulary of grain agriculture — planting, ripening, harvesting, taxing, and storing.

The character is a picture of the whole plant rather than of the grain. Oracle bone forms show a drooping ear at the top, a stalk with leaves in the middle, and roots below, weighted so that the head bends under its own ripeness. That drooping head is the character's defining feature and the thing that distinguishes it from [[木]], "tree," which it otherwise closely resembles.

禾 is rarely used as a standalone word today. Its work is done inside other characters, where it marks the subject as a crop or as something done to a crop.

= Meaning =

== Millet, then everything ==

The original referent was narrow. 禾 meant [[Foxtail millet|foxtail millet]] — the grain the [[Shuowen Jiezi]] calls 嘉[[穀]], "the fine grain," and the staple cereal of the north China plain long before rice became dominant there.

As the character generalized to cover all cereal crops, the specific sense of millet had to be rewritten with a different character, 穀 (simplified [[谷]]). This is a common pattern: a word broadens, and the original narrow sense gets a new graph of its own.

== Seedling and standing grain ==

Classical usage draws a distinction that English collapses. The [[Guangya]] glosses it directly: before the ear forms, the plant is [[苗]]; once it has headed, it is 禾. The word therefore refers specifically to grain that has reached the point of bearing, which is why it sits so naturally alongside the vocabulary of harvest.

The [[Book of Odes]] uses it in exactly that sense in the agricultural calendar of the "Seventh Month" — in the tenth month the 禾 is brought in, together with the millets, the hemp, the beans, and the wheat.

= Character structure =

Modern analysis is unanimous that 禾 is a pictogram, drawn from the whole plant. The [[Seal script|seal script]] preserves the shape clearly: an ear curving over at the top, a central stalk, leaves to either side, and a root system below.

In the modern printed form the plant has flattened into something that looks like 木 with an extra stroke on top, and Chinese learners are commonly taught it as exactly that — 木 plus [[丿]]. The mnemonic works, but it inverts the history: the resemblance is a result of both characters simplifying toward the same skeleton, not a sign that one is built from the other.

== What the Shuowen says, and what [[Duan Yucai]] did to it ==

[[Xu Shen]] analyzed 禾 as a compound rather than a pictogram, deriving it from 木 with an abbreviated 𠂹 depicting the ear. He also offered a sound-gloss for the name: the plant sprouts in the second month and ripens in the eighth, striking the mean of the seasons, and so is called 禾 because the word rhymes with [[和]], "harmony."

That etymology is folk etymology, of a kind the Shuowen produces often — a plausible-sounding link between a word and a homophone, standing in for an unavailable history.

The more interesting part is what happened to the text afterward. Duan Yucai, annotating in the Qing period, judged that the received wording had been tampered with: four characters had been inserted by a careless later hand, leaving a sentence he considered incoherent. He emended it to read simply "follows 木, and depicts its ear," and printed his correction in place of the transmitted text.

It is a useful reminder alongside [[收]] and [[攴]]. The Shuowen is not a fixed object. It is a text with a transmission history, already being corrected by its most authoritative commentator a thousand years before modern paleography arrived.

Duan also attached a moral gloss to the shape, in the manner of his period: the ear of grain droops back toward its own root, as the gentleman does not forget where he came from.

= As a radical =

禾 is [[Kangxi radicals|Kangxi radical]] 115, with 431 characters filed under it in the [[Kangxi Dictionary]]. They divide cleanly into two groups.

'''Plants and parts of plants:'''

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #6B530733;"
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! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Character !! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Sense
|-
| 秧 || seedling
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| 稻 || rice plant
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| 黍 || broomcorn millet
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| 穗 || ear of grain
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| 稼 || a growing crop
|}

'''Things done to grain:'''

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #6B530733;"
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! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Character !! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Sense
|-
| 種 || to plant; a seed
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| 秋 || autumn — 禾 beside 火
|-
| [[穫]] || to reap
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| 積 || to pile up, to accumulate
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| 租 || rent paid in grain
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| 稅 || tax
|}

The second group is worth pausing on. Rent and tax are written with the grain radical because for most of Chinese history that is what they were paid in. The character preserves an economic fact about the society that produced it.

Two further characters show the radical working phonetically rather than semantically. 和, "harmony," is 禾 beside [[口]], with 禾 supplying the sound. [[香]], "fragrance," combines 禾 with [[日]] and has a radical of its own, number 186, despite being built from grain.

== Unicode encoding ==

禾 is '''U+79BE''', a CJK Unified Ideograph. It has no simplified form, no Japanese variant, and no compatibility duplicates — the character is written identically in every regional standard, which makes it unusually simple compared with [[漢]] or [[穫]].

One further code point exists: '''U+2F72''' [[⽲|⽲ (Kangxi Radical Grain)]], for typesetting radical charts. It carries a compatibility decomposition to U+79BE, so NFKC and NFKD convert it while NFC and NFD leave it alone. It should not appear in running text.


= Pronunciation =

{| style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 12px 0; border: 1px solid #6B530733;"
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! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Language !! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Reading !! style="background-color: #6B5307; color: #ffffff; text-align: left; padding: 6px 10px;" | Notes
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| Mandarin Chinese || ''hé'' || Second tone; homophonous with 和
|-
| Cantonese || ''wo4'' || Also homophonous with 和
|-
| Japanese || ''ka'' (カ); ''ine'', ''nogi'' || Not a ''jōyō'' character; ''nogi'' names the awn, the bristle on an ear of grain
|-
| Korean || ''hwa'' (화) || Taught with the gloss 벼 화, "the ''hwa'' that means rice plant"
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| Vietnamese || ''hòa'' || Appears in Sino-Vietnamese compounds only
|}

The rhyme dictionaries give the [[Middle Chinese]] reading with the ''fanqie'' spelling 戶戈切.

= Use in modern languages =

禾 survives as a free word only in a few places. Chinese keeps 禾苗 (''hémiáo'', "seedling") and the literary 嘉禾 (''jiāhé''), an auspicious stalk of grain that classical texts treat as an omen of good government.

Its most widely used modern compound is the botanical one. 禾本科 names the grass family, [[Poaceae]], in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean alike — ''héběnkē'', ''kahonka'', and 화본과 respectively. Every cereal crop the character was ever used for belongs to it.

Japanese also uses the ''nogi'' reading for the awn itself, the fine bristle projecting from an ear of barley or rice, which is where the radical name のぎへん comes from.

= Further reading =

This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — the full sequence of [[Oracle bone script|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.shuowen.org/view/4353 禾 in the Shuowen Jiezi] — the entry with Duan Yucai's annotation and his emendation of the received text
* [https://zdic.net/hans/%E7%A6%BE 禾 on Zdic] — the Kangxi Dictionary text, classical citations, and dialectal readings
* [https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&rad=115 Radical 115 on the Chinese Text Project] — the full list of characters filed under 禾

= See also =

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