Radical 85

Radical 85 or radical water (水部) meaning "water" is a Kangxi radical; one of 35 of the 214 that are composed of 4 strokes. Its left-hand form,, is closely related to Radical 15, bīng (also known as 两点水 liǎngdiǎnshuǐ), meaning "ice", from which it differs by the addition of just one stroke.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 1,595 characters (out of 40,000) to be found under this radical.

水 is also the 77th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China, with and  being its associated indexing component.

In the Chinese wuxing ("Five Phases"), 水 represents the element Water. In Taoist cosmology, 水 (Water) is the nature component of the bagua diagram kǎn.

Sinogram
The radical is also used as an independent Chinese character. It is one of the Kyōiku kanji or Kanji taught in elementary school in Japan. It is a first grade kanji

Literature

 * Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5859-0204-2 tai
 * Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5859-0204-2 tai