Radical repeating characters in Chinese
All Chinese characters are made up of radicals, and there are no particular rules about which radicals can be put together, or how many times.
Quite a few Chinese characters just repeat the same radical twice. 朋 (péng) and 林 (lín) are pretty common examples.
Radical reduplication can go up to three or even four repetitions of the same component, though.
Here’s a (probably incomplete) list of radical repeating characters, known as 叠字 (diézì) in Chinese. Note that although this article is in the Mandarin category, these characters are also used in other Chinese languages and Japanese.
The list is organised subjectively by how much sense each item makes.
The Chinese Peraperakun plugin for Firefox and Chrome would be useful for reading this list.
双叠字: Double characters
- 2 × hundred → two hundred (funnily enough)
- 2 × happiness → double happiness
- 2 × child → twins
- 2 × tree → woods
- 2 × sun → bright (variant of 明)
- 2 × fire → flame
- 2 × mouth → to argue
- 2 × mouth → lu (one of the notes in Chinese music)
- 2 × woman → bicker
- 2 × again → pair
- 2 × king → gems mounted together
- 2 × person → from
- 2 × subdue → fearful
- 2 × big → compare (variant of 比)
- 2 × moon → friend
三叠字: Triple characters
_Also known as _品字型汉字
- 3 × person → crowd
- 3 × stone → pile of rocks
- 3 x big → variant of 猋
- See also: 𡘙師傅 - Sinoglot
- 3 × bird → flock of birds
- 3 × horse → horde of horses
- _3 × spring → group of springs (water)_
- 3 × fields → separated fields
- 3 × fragrant → aromatic (variant of 馨)
- 3 × gold → prosperity
- 3 × tree → forest
- 3 × white → bright
- 3 × fire → flame
- 3 × thunder → sound of thunder
- 3 × tongue → speech (variant of 話)
- 3 × sprouting plant → plants
- 3 × insect → insect (these are simplified / traditional versions)
- 3 × water → flood
- 3 × hand → pickpocket
- 3 × ear → whisper
- 3 × warrior → strength
- 3 × eye → beauty
- 3 × child → weak
- 3 × sheep → stench
- 3 × strength → endless exertion
- 3 × vertical → upright
- 3 × speech → speak quickly
- 3 × fish → fresh (variant of 鮮)
- 3 × dragon → flying dragon
- 4 × heart→ virtuous
- 3 × shell → sturdy
- 3 × wind → cowardly
- _3 × again → seem (variant of _若)
- _3 × old → break (variant of _哲)
- 3 × cow → rush around
- 3 × woman → treachery
- 3 × car → explosion
- 3 × dog → whirlwind
- 3 × stop → rough
- 3 × sun → crystal
- 3 × mouth → item
- 3 × hair → crisp
- 3 × earth → Yao (legendary emperor)
- _3 × selfish → rampart (variant of _垒)
- 3 × blade → Li (a Chinese surname)
四叠字: Quadruple characters
- 4 × fly → fly
- 4 × fire→ fiery
- 4 × moon → bright (variant of 郎)
- 4 × bird→ gather
- 4 × again → stitch together
Download this list of characters:
Be sure to set character encoding to UTF-8 to view these files correctly.
- Tab-separated with character, pinyin, English and comment fields
- A plain list of just the characters
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