Pinyin: Wade–Giles: lung2 Jyutping: lung4 | Bopomofo: ㄌㄨㄥˊ Cantonese Yale: lung4 | |
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Hiragana: リョウ ・リュウ ryō, ryūたつ tatsu |
Radical 212, 龍, 龙, or 竜 meaning "dragon", is one of only two of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 16 strokes. The character arose as a stylized drawing of a Chinese dragon, and refers to a version of the dragon in each East Asian culture:
It may also refer to the Dragon as it appears in the Chinese zodiac. It is used as the symbol for Tatsu, a roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain, in California.
In the Kangxi Dictionary there are only 14 characters (out of 40,000) to be found under this radical.
It occurs as a phonetic complement in some fairly common Chinese characters, for example 聾 = "deaf", which is composed of 龍 "dragon" and the "ear" 耳 radical, 耳, pronounced similarly to 龍: "dragon gives sound, ear gives meaning".
Literature
References
Radical 212 Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA