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| 攵 | |||||||||||||||
| Meaning | to rap; to tap | ||||||||||||||
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| Radical | 攴 + 0 | Strokes | 4 | ||||||||||||
| Full form | 攴 | Strokes | 4 | ||||||||||||
| Unicode | U+6535 | ||||||||||||||
[ Mandarin ]
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[ Cantonese ]
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[ Japanese ]
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[ Korean ]
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| Four-stroke shapes not to confuse | ||
| 攵 rap | 攵 | 4 strokes |
|---|---|---|
| 夂 go | 夂 | 3 strokes |
| 夊 trail | 夊 | 3 strokes |
| 文 writing | 文 | 4 strokes |
| Different radicals with different indexes; only 攵 is radical 66. | ||
攵 is the everyday written form of 攴, Kangxi radical 66. The two are the same radical and the same word, pronounced pū in Mandarin, but 攵 is the shape that actually appears inside characters — 教, 政, 收, 放, 敗, 敬 — while the fuller 攴 survives in only a handful of them.
It has never been an independent word. 攵 exists purely as a component, contributed by the clerical script reform of the Han period for the plain reason that four quick strokes are faster to write than the older shape. Every character that uses it is filed in dictionaries under 攴.
What makes 攵 unexpectedly interesting is its name. Because the shape no longer resembles anything, each country invented its own way of describing it, and the four traditions landed on four completely different answers — one naming what it looks like, one naming what it means, and one hedging between two possibilities.
攵 is a product of 隸變, the clerical-script transformation that reshaped most of the Chinese writing system between roughly the third century BCE and the second century CE. The older 攴 drew a hand holding a stick; under the brush, that resolved into a four-stroke shape with no pictorial content left in it.
The change was driven by writing speed rather than by any reform program. Scribes working quickly rounded and flattened the older forms, and the results hardened into the standard. 攵 won out so completely that a modern reader who has never opened a dictionary may never have seen 攴 at all.
A small set of characters kept the older shape anyway, among them 敲 "to knock" and 寇 "bandit." There is no principle behind which characters kept it; the distribution is a historical accident of which forms happened to be standardized when.
The shape lost its meaning, so every tradition had to describe it somehow. The results diverge sharply.
| Country | Name | What the name refers to |
|---|---|---|
| China | 反文旁 (fǎnwénpáng) | "the reversed-文 side" — the shape looks like a mirrored 文 |
| Japan | のぶん (nobun) | "ノ plus 文" — the same visual reading, described stroke by stroke |
| Japan | ぼくづくり (bokuzukuri) | "the boku on the right" — from the character's on'yomi |
| Korea | 칠복부 (chilbokbu) | "the strike-bok radical" — from the meaning and the reading |
China and Japan both named it for what it resembles, and independently arrived at the same observation: it looks like 文 written backwards. Korea named it for what it means instead. Japan, characteristically, kept both approaches in circulation, and ぼくづくり is the name used when the radical is being discussed as a radical rather than pointed at on the page.
Japanese also carries a fifth name that is quietly wrong. ぼくにょう treats the element as a 繞 — a component that wraps around the bottom-left of a character — but no character in Unicode actually places 攵 in that position. ぼくづくり, "right-hand side," describes where it really sits. The mistaken name persists anyway, and has even generated a corrupted variant, ぼんにょう.
For the full form 攴, Japanese uses とまた (tomata), literally "ト and 又," reading off the two printed components. Chinese calls that form 缺支 (quēzhī).
Nearly every character in radical 66 uses the 攵 form. A representative set:
The common thread is deliberate action taken on something — the semantic contribution the radical makes wherever it appears. See 攴 for the origin of that sense.
Three other shapes sit close enough to cause real errors, and the stroke count is the reliable test.
夂 (radical 34) and 夊 (radical 35) are both three strokes, not four. They appear at the bottom of characters such as 夏 and 夆 rather than on the right, and they are indexed under entirely different radical numbers. Writing 攵 with three strokes produces a different character.
文 (radical 67) is four strokes and is the shape 攵 is named after in two languages, but it is a separate radical with the unrelated meaning of writing or culture. It sits immediately after 攴 in radical order, which does nothing to reduce the confusion.
攵 is U+6535, a CJK Unified Ideograph, separately encoded from 攴 at U+6534. Unihan records the two as semantic variants of each other rather than as one character with two glyph shapes, so they do not unify and no normalization converts between them.
A separate code point, U+2E99 ⺙, exists in the CJK Radicals Supplement for use in radical charts. It carries no decomposition of any kind, meaning it will never normalize to U+6535 — text copied out of a radical table will silently fail to match the real character. See 攴 for the full four-code-point picture.
This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — the complete list of characters written with the form, its glyph evolution through the clerical reform, and the regional naming variants in full — can consult the following:
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