禾
Meaning	grain on the stalk; cereal crop
Radical	禾 + 0	Strokes	5
Formation	Pictogram
Unicode	U+79BE
[ Mandarin ] Pinyin hé Zhuyin ㄏㄜˊ Radical name 禾字旁 (hézìpáng)
[ Cantonese ] Jyutping wo4
[ Japanese ] On'yomi カ (ka) Kun'yomi いね (ine), のぎ (nogi) Radical name のぎへん (nogihen), いねへん (inehen)
[ Korean ] Reading 화 (hwa) Eumhun 벼 (byeo) 화 — "rice plant" Level High school Radical name 벼화부 (byeohwabu)
[ Vietnamese ] Hán-Việt hòa

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.

The original referent was narrow. 禾 meant 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.

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.

Modern analysis is unanimous that 禾 is a pictogram, drawn from the whole plant. The 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.

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.

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

Plants and parts of plants:

Character	Sense
秧	seedling
稻	rice plant
黍	broomcorn millet
穗	ear of grain
稼	a growing crop

Things done to grain:

Character	Sense
種	to plant; a seed
秋	autumn — 禾 beside 火
穫	to reap
積	to pile up, to accumulate
租	rent paid in grain
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.

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 (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.

Language	Reading	Notes
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"
Vietnamese	hòa	Appears in Sino-Vietnamese compounds only

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

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.

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:

• Unicode Standard Annex #38 — the authoritative definition of the Unihan database fields used throughout this article
• Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants — Taiwan Ministry of Education; searchable, with historical variant forms and source documents for each character
• 禾 in the Shuowen Jiezi — the entry with Duan Yucai's annotation and his emendation of the received text
• 禾 on Zdic — the Kangxi Dictionary text, classical citations, and dialectal readings
• Radical 115 on the Chinese Text Project — the full list of characters filed under 禾

• Chinese characters
• Kangxi radicals
• Radical (Chinese characters)