Kangxi Radical Do Not

It labels the dictionary radical for 毋; it is not the ordinary character.

A radical is the part a Chinese dictionary uses to group entries. Unicode pairs ⽏ with 毋 but assigns them different roles: ⽏ is the radical-form symbol; 毋 is the ordinary character used in words and sentences.

How did 毋 become a radical name?

毋 first wrote negation; its radical form later became a dictionary label.

A bronze inscription from the Western Zhou middle period preserves an early form of 毋. Oracle-bone writing used 母 for the negative character; later scribes distinguished 毋 by changing the inner marks. Later examples appear in Chu manuscripts, the small-seal writing catalogued in Shuowen (an early dictionary), Qin slips, and Han clerical writing.

毋 began as a borrowed graph for negation and prohibition. In 1615, Mei Yingzuo’s Zihui, an early Chinese character dictionary, reduced the older Shuowen radical list to 214 and grouped entries by radical, then by the strokes left over. The Kangxi Dictionary adopted this lookup method in 1716. ⽏ labels that dictionary role; it does not replace 毋 in prose.

Does 毋 mean the same thing everywhere?

No: its reading and grammatical job depend on the language.

In Classical Chinese, 毋 could prohibit an action (“do not”), mean “not,” or overlap with 無 (“not have”). Taiwanese Hokkien preserves 毋 for volitional negation: a speaker’s unwillingness or decision not to act. Its reading is written m̄ in Latin-letter transcription, a nasal m sound that can stand as its own syllable. Before a verb it expresses that negation; fixed expressions can lose the nuance, and sentence-final 毋 can ask for confirmation. These are uses of 毋, not ⽏.