Kangxi Radical Old

⽼ is the filing symbol for characters indexed under “old.”

An ancestor of 老 appears in Shang-period oracle-bone inscriptions, carved on bone and shell for divination, as a bent, long-haired person with a staff. In that period the sign could also name a place. Bronze inscriptions later use 老 for an older person, an elder official, and, in a usage linked to 考, “father.”

The index system came later: the 121 CE Shuowen Jiezi, an early Chinese character dictionary, had 540 sections. In 1615, Mei Yingzuo's Zihui introduced a method using 214 radicals and counts of the strokes left over; the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary adopted it. In that list, 老 is radical 125. Readers can narrow a lookup by radical, then leftover strokes.

Why is ⽼ not just 老?

⽼ is the radical symbol; 老 is the ordinary written character.

Their shapes can look nearly alike, but Unicode assigns them different roles: ⽼ is a radical indexing symbol, while 老 is the Han character used in words. Use 老 in ordinary writing and ⽼ only when a reference asks for the radical; a similar shape does not make them interchangeable.

The written character 老 also has uses beyond “old.” Warring States texts use 老夫 as a nonliteral self-reference (“I, an old man”); later texts put 老 before names and other nouns. These are uses of 老, not meanings of ⽼.