Radical 21

Radical 21 or radical spoon (匕部) meaning "spoon" is one of the 23 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals total) composed of two strokes.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 19 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

匕 is also the 15th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China.

Variant forms
as a component of Chinese characters takes different forms in different printing typefaces or different Chinese characters. In the Kangxi Dictionary, current standard Simplified Chinese, Hong Kong Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, the second stroke of 匕 is a left-falling stroke. In Taiwan Traditional Chinese, the Standard Form of National Characters prescribes the second stroke of 匕 is horizontal, 匕 with a left-falling second stroke is also widely used.

The nuance of this character applies to both printing and handwriting forms.