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灬 is called 四點水!


jbradfor

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I'm starting to think that Chinese do this on purpose, just because Chinese isn't hard enough to learn on its own.....

灬 is the fire radical, 火, when on the bottom. See, four dots in 灬, four strokes in 火. Not very hard.

I was trying to describe a character to someone, and tried to say it had the fire radical on the bottom, so I said "下面有火". He looked confused, so I wrote it for him, and then he laughed and said that they call it "四點水"!

So why, when describing it, do they call it "four dot water"? Would calling it 四点火 really be that hard?

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It's one of those names of radicals that have nothing to do with what they actually are, such as 雙人旁 (彳), 左耳旁 (as in 陽).

BTW, you can call it 四點火.

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Thanks for the warning about the other radicals! I assume somewhere there is a list of what Chinese "commonly call" the various radicals, vs what they actually mean?

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There seem to be quite a lot of lists like this one or that one that give radicals names, but I could not find one that also has the meaning of the radical.

I got the impression that 四點底, 四點火, 四點兒 were listed more frequently than 四點水 but I could be mistaken.

Interestingly enough, 冫 is often listed as 兩點水兒.

(四點水 does have some google hits)

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