HSK Guide

部首 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

部首 1035 画0 汉字

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.

汉字 filed under

No published character on HSK Guide is filed under this radical yet. 汉字库.