CJK Radical Ram

Use a Unicode-aware insertion tool.

In a document editor, enter U+2EB7 with its Unicode or character-insertion command. In HTML, use ⺷. A language keyboard may not offer this specialist radical as an ordinary word candidate.

What does ⺷ mean inside a Chinese character?

It marks the sheep radical in a top position.

Radical-stroke indexing files a Han character—a Chinese character also used in Japanese and Korean writing—under a component, then counts the strokes elsewhere in the full character. Here ⺷ marks the sheep or ram component at the top; ⺶ is its left-position form. This is a reference convention, not ordinary spelling.

The older story belongs to 羊: its forms appear in Shang oracle-bone and Western Zhou bronze inscriptions as a ram’s-head pictograph. The Eastern Han Chinese dictionary Shuowen Jiezi placed 羊 in its own section, 羊部 (the 羊 department). The eighteenth-century Kangxi dictionary tradition later made radical sections a standard way to look up characters. In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean reference traditions, the 羊 family remains a character component; English labels vary among sheep, goat, and ram.

Why does ⺷ show as a box?

The font may not contain this specialist glyph.

A missing-glyph box can appear even when the character data is intact. As of 2026, specialist fonts for the CJK Radicals Supplement provide coverage, but broad CJK coverage does not guarantee support for every specialist block. Check the final display in the font used for your chart, lesson, or label.