HSK Guide

Radical 103a bolt of cloth; a leg, a foot; a measure word

(third tone, dipping)

a bolt of cloth; a leg, a foot; a measure word

Radical 1035 strokes0 characters

Where the shape comes from

Read one way as a variant of 足, a leg or foot, and read another as a folded bolt of cloth ready for market, the two accounts never quite reconciled even in the old dictionaries. It survives today mainly as the measure word for a bolt of cloth or a horse, and as a rare dictionary classifier for a small set of characters, among them 疏, to unclog, to be sparse, whose own history is tangled enough that scholars still debate how much of it this radical actually explains.

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No published character on HSK Guide is filed under this radical yet. Character explorer.