CJK Radical Cow

It marks the cow radical in Chinese-character references.

A radical is a component used to group characters or find them in a dictionary. ⺧ is a special cow-radical form related to 牛, not the ordinary written character for “cow” or “ox.” It is a variant of the cow radical in the Kangxi radical list, a traditional system for organizing Chinese characters by components.

The recognizable ancestor of 牛 appears in Shang-era oracle-bone inscriptions—carved records people used to seek guidance through divination and to record sacrifices. Around 100 AD, the dictionary Shuowen Jiezi organized Chinese characters by radicals, using components as lookup groups. Much later, radical lists such as the Kangxi list used cow-radical forms to organize characters; ⺧ is one of those forms.

How is ⺧ different from 牛?

Use 牛 for the full character; ⺧ is the radical form.

牛 is the ordinary complete character for cow or ox and the familiar base shape of this radical; ⺧ is its separately encoded radical variant. A character picker or reference may require that exact form, so selecting 牛 will not always satisfy it.

Inside written characters, 牜 is the cow component on the left; 𠂒 is another top-component form. The separate character ⽜ represents the Kangxi Radical Cow. Fonts may proportion a component-form radical differently from a complete character, so appearance alone cannot tell you whether a viewer has shown the same encoded character.