The Foot Radical 足: Overview, Mnemonics and Vocabulary

One of the most effective ways to master Chinese is learning and understanding radicals. 

This is common advice that almost all newbie Chinese-language learners hear when they start out on their Mandarin journey. 

This article will dig deep into the foot radical in Chinese to help you understand what it is, how to remember it quickly, and show you the common words containing it. 

What is the foot radical in Chinese? 

Chinese foot radical

The Chinese radical for the foot is 足 (zú). It can also mean sufficient or enough, but we will only talk about this radical in relation to the feet in this article. 

The foot radical is one of the most commonly used radicals. There are 580 characters to be found under this radical ​​in the Kangxi Dictionary (the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th.)

What is the stroke order of the foot radical? 

The foot radical has seven strokes in total, written in the following stroke order:

Foot radical stroke order

How can you memorize the radical quickly?

Memorizing the foot radical might take some imagination.

For the foot radical, try this mnemonic: Did you know that there are about 250,000 sweat glands in a pair of feet? It's no wonder why our feet stink.

And for the foot character, this mnemonic: I always end up putting my foot (足) in my mouth (口) because I don't speak before I talk. 

If you want more Chinese mnemonics, Pandanese is here to help! Pandanese is a Chinese character memorization software that combines mnemonics and a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) for you to effectively memorize hanzi. 

Foot radical vocabulary list for you!

If you see Chinese characters and words with the foot radical, they will likely have foot-related meanings. For example, soccer and football are both called 足球 (zúqiú) in Chinese. To avoid misunderstanding and be clearer in your speech, you can refer to football as 美国足球 (Měiguó zúqiú), meaning American football. 

Find more characters containing this radical in the table below: 

In closing 

Learning Chinese radicals lets you learn Chinese words more easily by letting you break down their complexity into smaller components. Such as with the foot radical where you can see there were plenty of foot and motion-related meanings.