Look up a hanzi's stroke count with pinyin, radical and structure, or paste a whole paragraph to total its strokes and compare Kangxi counts
Paste or type a character - one at a time
Enter one hanzi to get its total stroke count along with pinyin, radical and glyph structure
Paste a passage to list each character's strokes and total them, skipping punctuation, digits and letters
Switch between standard and Kangxi strokes in one click for Chinese name analysis and five-grid calculations
Characters outside the dictionary are reported as such instead of returning a wrong stroke count
Recently looked-up characters are kept in your browser, ready to click again, and can be cleared any time
The stroke dictionaries ship as local data files and everything runs in your browser, with no upload or sign-up
Use Single Character to check one hanzi, or Batch Totalling to total a whole passage. Switch between them at any time.
Type one character and click Look Up Strokes, or paste a passage and click Count Strokes; punctuation and digits are ignored automatically.
Standard strokes are shown by default; switch to Kangxi strokes to see the count as the character appears as a headword in the Kangxi Dictionary.
Use Copy Result or Copy List to paste the output into a document; recent lookups appear below and can be clicked to run again.
Five-grid name analysis requires Kangxi stroke counts, so the right convention matters
Check a character's stroke count, radical and structure before practice to avoid missing or adding strokes
Paste a passage to get the total stroke count quickly and size up writing practice
Confirm stroke counts and structural types as a basis for glyph design and copybook layout
Check the stroke count of each character in a name against name-study references
Confirm the radical assignment and structure of uncommon characters to reduce glyph errors
A stroke is one continuous movement of the pen from touch-down to lift-off. The modern Chinese standard groups basic strokes into five categories: horizontal, vertical, left-falling, dot and turning. Turns include the horizontal-turn, vertical-turn and left-falling-turn variants. Count according to the standard glyph, one stroke at a time, and note that the turns in characters like 乃 and 及 are single strokes and must not be split.
The difference comes from radical merging. The Kangxi Dictionary restores a component to its standalone form when counting: the water radical 氵 is counted as 水 with 4 strokes, the grass radical 艹 as 艸 with 6 strokes, and the heart radical 忄 as 心 with 4 strokes. The modern standard instead counts the shapes actually written, so 氵 is just 3 strokes. This tool takes the value for the character as a standalone headword and does not swap in variant forms such as 醜, 韆 or 纔. To count variant forms, convert the text first and then look it up.
A radical is a category introduced by dictionaries for indexing; for most phono-semantic characters it is the semantic component, such as 氵 in 江 or 心 in 想. Structure describes how components combine inside the square: left-right (好), top-bottom (花), fully enclosed (國), partially enclosed, and single-body (王). Recognising the structure helps with both glyph understanding and writing order.
Three common mistakes: treating a connected movement as one stroke or splitting a turn into two, such as the horizontal-turn hook in 門 which is a single stroke; counting components by their simplified shape and mixing it with the Kangxi convention; and counting printed shapes directly while ignoring the standard glyph, for example 木 changes its right-falling stroke to a dot as a component, which keeps the total the same but changes the stroke shapes. Use the tool's result and cross-check with a copybook when precision matters.
| Character | Pinyin | Radical | Structure | Standard | Kangxi |
|---|