Chinese Radicals (1) Wood Radical - 木字旁

Wood radical comes from character Wood - 木字旁

The original shell bone script for Wood is

If we put two shell bone Woods together

which is Forest of shell bone script. Here the two Wood are equal.

The small seal script for Wood is

We put two small seal script Woods together,

which is the Forest of small seal script. The two Wood are equal too.

So far so good.

The clerical script of Wood is

The difference from the clerical script is the left-falling and right-falling strokes are outward or stretch out, not inward like the old scripts. Because clerical script was popular in Han Dynasty when people could make papers, so people could draw the strokes horizontally very wide. In contrast, people could only drew shell bone script and small seal script on bamboo slips in the earlier time, so the strokes of characters are inward.

If we put two clerical script Woods together, we got

People faced a problem, two strokes are across each other which is not acceptable. So people drew the right-falling stroke of left Wood shorter to allow the left-falling stroke of right Wood to have room to stretch out. It becomes like the following

The left part 

is called Wood radical because it is different from Wood character but actually it is from Wood and means Wood. Wood radical is only on the left of the character, because it is a rule that when the across happens, the left part should give space for the right part. The above 林 has the right part keeping no change from 木 character.

Later, standard script, and song typeface Wood have the similar radical.

So we know now that the Wood radical is actually from the Wood character. There were no Wood radical before clerical script. It is changed to avoid the across of the two strokes in late clerical, standard scripts, and song typeface.