# 244 Radicals Build the Chinese Bible

> The 2,996 characters of the Chinese Union Version (和合本, simplified) are built from 244 radicals, and the commonest of them, 亻, appears in characters used 87,420 times.

Question: most common radicals Chinese Bible
Answer: 244 radicals
Page: https://chinese-bible.com/en/reference/radicals-in-the-chinese-bible

A radical is the component a Chinese dictionary files a character under, and it usually hints at meaning: 亻 for people, 讠 for speech, 心 for the heart and feelings. This page counts radicals the way a reader meets them — weighted by how often the characters carrying them actually occur, not by how many characters exist.

That weighting changes the answer. 亻 (87,420), 白 (50,135), 口 (48,805) lead the list, and the reason 白 ranks so high is a single character: 的, the possessive particle, which is filed under it and is the most frequent character in the text at 48,163 occurrences. Frequency lists of Chinese are always partly a list of grammar.

As a study tool the list works best from the middle down: 讠, 扌, 心, 木 and 阝 recur across hundreds of distinct characters, so learning the radical buys you a guess at the meaning of words you have never seen. The site's guide to radicals covers the forms themselves; this page is about which of them earn their place in Scripture.

## The most frequent radicals, weighted by character occurrences

| # | Radical | Character occurrences |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 亻 | 87,420 |
| 2 | 白 | 50,135 |
| 3 | 口 | 48,805 |
| 4 | 一 | 38,642 |
| 5 | 人 | 33,209 |
| 6 | 土 | 27,666 |
| 7 | 戈 | 21,944 |
| 8 | 日 | 21,315 |
| 9 | 讠 | 20,928 |
| 10 | 辶 | 20,834 |
| 11 | 扌 | 18,058 |
| 12 | 刂 | 17,315 |
| 13 | 心 | 17,288 |
| 14 | 木 | 16,883 |
| 15 | 阝 | 13,184 |

100% of the characters in the text have a radical recorded.

## Questions

**Why is 白 so high?**

Because 的 is filed under it, and 的 alone occurs 48,163 times — about 5.2% of every character in the Bible.

**How many radicals do I need to know?**

The top fifteen in this table cover the great majority of character occurrences; the full set of 244 is a reference list, not a study plan.

**Where does the radical data come from?**

Make Me a Hanzi, the same open dataset behind the stroke-order animations on the word pages.

## Method

- Text: 和合本 (Chinese Union Version), simplified script — public domain
- Words: forward maximum matching against CC-CEDICT (this site's own segmentation)
- HSK levels: HSK 3.0 levels from the complete-hsk-vocabulary list; band 7 covers HSK 7-9
- Reading times: 260 characters a minute (an assumption)
- Computed: 2026-09-22

These are reproducible counts over a public-domain text, not a peer-reviewed study. Difficulty ranks are one stated formula, not a validated readability score.


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- Definitions: CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
- If you share this file onward, keep this notice and share alike.
- Character data: Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License / LGPL).
- Bible text: public domain — 和合本 · World English Bible · Louis Segond 1910.
- Built with https://chinese-bible.com