Semantic Components in Kanji (意符): What the Water, Person, and Tree Radicals Tell You About Meaning
Semantic components in kanji are the meaning-bearing parts inside phono-semantic characters: the 氵 in 海 signals "water," the 亻 in 休 signals "person," and the 木 in 林 signals "tree."12 Learn the top 30, and a new kanji becomes a problem with two halves, not a black box.
Overview
What a semantic component is, in one sentence
A 意符 (ifu, "meaning mark") is the meaning-bearing component of a kanji formed as a 形声 (keisei) phono-semantic compound. It pairs with a 音符 (onpu, "sound mark") that signals the on'yomi.12
Around 80% of kanji are 形声 (phono-semantic compounds): one piece signals a broad meaning category, and the other suggests the sound.3 The standard Japanese term for the meaning piece is 意符, read ifu. It is written 意 ("meaning") + 符 ("mark"); the on'yomi reading いふ is the only attested reading.1
The 意符 / 音符 framing applies specifically to 形声 (phono-semantic) characters. Pictographs (象形), simple ideograms (指事), ideogrammic compounds (会意), and the rest of the 六書 categories do not split into a meaning-mark and a sound-mark in this strict sense. Their semantic information is distributed across the whole character.2
How this article is scoped
This article covers the meaning side of a 形声 kanji. The phonetic side, meaning when and how the right-hand piece predicts on'yomi, belongs to a separate companion article on phonetic components.
Earlier sibling articles cover the strict 部首 definition (one indexing head per kanji), the 214 Kangxi inventory, the radical-vs-component distinction, and the seven by-position names (へん, つくり, かんむり, あし, たれ, にょう, かまえ). This article assumes that background.34 The working frequency-ordered top-N reference list belongs to a companion top-50 page; the list here is grouped by meaning family, not frequency.
How a semantic component works
The 意符 and 音符 split inside a 形声 kanji
In a 形声 kanji, one component is the 意符, which signals a broad meaning category. Another is the 音符, which signals the on'yomi.123 The Japanese Wikipedia 形声 article gives the working definition: 意符 is "a symbol representing the category or type of thing," paired with 音符, "a symbol representing pronunciation."2
The semantic component and the dictionary radical usually coincide. Wikipedia's "Chinese character classification" article phrases it this way: "a semantic component, also called a determinative or signific … In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary."5 The phrase "in most cases" matters. The limits-of-prediction section below returns to it.
A worked decomposition: 海 = 氵 + 毎
海 (sea) is a 形声 kanji. Its 意符 is 氵 (water) and its 音符 is 毎.6
海に行きたいです。6
"I want to go to the sea."
A reader who has never met 海 before can recover "something to do with water" from the 氵 and an approximate on'yomi from 毎. The match is rough rather than exact: 毎 is read マイ, while 海 is read カイ. The phonetic component sets the rhyme family, not the exact reading. The companion article on phonetic components covers that boundary.6
氵 itself is not a separate radical. It is the hen-position variant of 水 (Kangxi 85): same Kangxi entry, position-determined shape.7 The same logic applies to 河 (river), where the semantic 氵 sits next to the phonetic 可.8
この川は大きい河です。8
"This river is a large one."
Why the same shape carries the same meaning across hundreds of kanji
Of the 2,136 jōyō kanji, the top 51 radicals cover roughly three quarters of the inventory.9 The top six (口, 水/氵, 木, 人/亻, 手/扌, 心/忄) account for a large share by themselves. 氵 alone appears in over a hundred jōyō kanji.10
When 氵 sits as the 意符 of a 形声 kanji, the kanji's meaning lies inside a water-and-liquid family: 海 (sea), 河 (river), 池 (pond), 湖 (lake), 流 (flow), 泳 (swim), 涙 (tears), 酒 (alcohol), 汗 (sweat), 浴 (bathe).68117
A learner who has internalised "氵 = water family" can meet an unfamiliar 氵 kanji and predict a water-adjacent gloss with high recall. Then they can narrow the meaning with the phonetic component or context. Nguyen et al. (2017) measured this effect: experimental groups taught semantic-radical knowledge "successfully transferred the semantic radical strategy to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar characters containing semantic radicals that had not been taught."12
The top 30 semantic components by meaning family
The table below groups the top semantic components by meaning family rather than frequency rank. Each row lists the radical, including the hen-position variant where the shape changes. It also gives the Kangxi number, Japanese position-name, meaning family, and three jōyō example kanji with a transparency rating.
The transparency scale, as used throughout:
- High: the semantic radical and the modern Japanese gloss line up directly.
- Medium: the link holds via a narrowed or extended sense (dye-via-silk, govern-via-river).
- Low: the link survives etymologically but is opaque to a modern reader without a glyph-origin lookup.
The list is explicit about two collisions that overview lists often fold into single entries: 月 splits into moon (Kangxi 74) and flesh (Kangxi 130), and 阝 splits into left-mound (Kangxi 170) and right-village (Kangxi 163). They are listed as paired rows under their families.
Nature and the elements
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 氵 (← 水) | 85 | さんずい (hen) | water, liquid, flow | 海 "sea" (high)6; 池 "pond" (high)11; 法 "law" (low, etymology via a judicial water-and-廌 scene)13 |
| 火 / 灬 | 86 | 火 free; 灬 れっか (ashi) | fire, heat, burning | 炊 "to cook" (high)14; 照 "to shine" (medium, 灬 is fire-feet not a separate radical)15; 烈 "intense" (medium) |
| 木 | 75 | きへん (hen); free | tree, wood, plant material | 林 "grove" (high); 村 "village" (medium, wooden settlement)16; 机 "desk" (high) |
| 土 | 32 | つちへん (hen) | earth, ground | 地 "ground" (high); 場 "place" (high); 城 "castle" (high, earthwork) |
| 金 | 167 | かねへん (hen) | metal, money | 銀 "silver" (high); 銅 "copper" (high)17; 鉄 "iron" (high) |
| 石 | 112 | いしへん (hen) | stone, mineral | 岩 "boulder" (high)18; 砂 "sand" (high); 破 "to break" (medium, stone-as-tool) |
| 雨 | 173 | あめかんむり (kanmuri) | weather from the sky | 雪 "snow" (high)19; 雲 "cloud" (high); 電 "electricity" (low, extended from lightning) |
| 日 | 72 | ひへん (hen); free | sun, time of day | 明 "bright" (high, 日 + 月 ideogrammic)20; 時 "time" (high); 春 "spring" (medium) |
| 月 (moon) | 74 | つきへん (hen) | moon, lunar time | 朝 "morning" (high, genuinely moon)21; 期 "period" (high); 望 "to gaze at" (high) |
| 月 (← 肉, flesh) | 130 | にくづき (hen) | body part, organ, flesh | 肝 "liver" (high)22; 腸 "intestine" (high)23; 胸 "chest" (high) |
銅は金属です。17
"Copper is a metal."
The 銅 example shows the metal family at its most transparent: 金 ("metal, money") plus the phonetic 同 gives a metal-name kanji read どう.17 The same pattern produces 銀, 鉄, 鉱, 錯, 鋼.
The 月-shape ambiguity is the single largest trap in the semantic-radical system. The 月 in 朝, 期, 望 is genuinely the moon radical (Kangxi 74). The visually identical 月 in 肝, 腸, 肺, 胸, 腕, 服, 肌 is the flesh radical 肉 / ⺼ (Kangxi 130) in left-component form, which "is hardly distinguishable" from 月 in modern Japanese typography.242526 The form-collisions section below covers it in full.
The human body and the person
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 亻 (← 人) | 9 | にんべん (hen) | person, human action | 休 "to rest" (high, person leaning on tree)27; 体 "body" (high); 仕 "to serve" (medium, social role) |
| 口 | 30 | くちへん (hen); free | mouth, speech sound, opening | 噴 "spout" (medium, extended from mouth-aperture)28; 味 "taste" (high); 唱 "to sing, to chant" (high) |
| 目 | 109 | めへん (hen); free | eye, vision | 眠 "sleep" (high, eyes closed)29; 看 "to watch" (high); 直 "straight" (low, archaic eye-and-vertical-line) |
| 耳 | 128 | みみへん (hen) | ear, hearing | 聞 "to hear" (high, 耳 + phonetic 門)30; 聴 "to listen" (high); 取 "to take" (low, from ear-cutting in old Chinese contexts) |
| 扌 (← 手) | 64 | てへん (hen) | hand, manual action | 打 "to hit" (high)31; 持 "to hold" (high); 押 "to push" (high) |
| 足 | 157 | あしへん (hen); free | foot, leg, motion of the foot | 路 "road" (medium, travelled-by-foot); 跳 "to jump" (high); 蹴 "to kick" (high) |
| 忄 / 心 | 61 | りっしんべん (hen); こころ (ashi) | heart, emotion, mind | 怒 "angry" (high)32; 性 "nature, disposition" (medium); 思 "to think" (high) |
The person family is the easiest case for showing how this works. 亻 is the にんべん form of 人 (Kangxi 9), and 休 ("rest") is the standard worked example: 人 + 木, an ideogrammic compound for "a person leaning against a tree, resting."27
休みたい。27
"I want to rest."
休 is unusual because it is 会意 (ideogrammic), not 形声: both pieces are semantic, with no separate sound-mark. It still shows the broader point that the 亻 component signals "person, human action." That pattern holds across the dozens of 亻 kanji a learner meets at N5 through N3 (体, 仕, 住, 何, 作, 使, 化, 仏, 代, 付, 任, 似, 伝, 位, 低, 例, 信, 修).
Action and tools
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 攵 (← 攴) | 66 | ぼくづくり / のぶん (tsukuri) | striking action, causation | 教 "to teach" (medium, striking-as-discipline etymology); 政 "government" (medium); 改 "to reform" (medium) |
| 刀 / 刂 | 18 | りっとう (tsukuri) | blade, cutting | 切 "to cut" (high); 刻 "to engrave" (high); 別 "to separate" (high) |
| 弓 | 57 | ゆみへん (hen) | bow, drawing-and-stretching | 引 "to pull" (high); 強 "strong" (medium); 弱 "weak" (medium) |
| 矢 | 111 | やへん (hen) | arrow | 知 "to know" (low, etymology contested); 短 "short" (low, from a height-comparison-by-arrow image) |
| 戈 | 62 | ほこづくり (tsukuri) | halberd, weapon | 戦 "war, to battle" (high); 戯 "amusement" (medium); 我 "I, self" (low, halberd-as-personal-mark) |
| 言 | 149 | ごんべん (hen); free | speech, saying | 語 "language" (high)33; 話 "talk" (high); 識 "to discern" (medium, knowledge-via-speech)34 |
| 糸 | 120 | いとへん (hen); free | thread, cord; by extension cloth, dye, lineage | 終 "to end" (medium, the knot at the end of a cord)35; 紅 "crimson" (medium, dye-via-silk)36; 線 "line, thread" (high) |
矢 (arrow) and 戈 (halberd) are included because their shapes warrant a complete meaning-family treatment. Both are low-productivity in modern jōyō: 矢 carries a small cluster (知, 短, and a handful more), and 戈 covers 戦, 戯, 我, 成 and not much else with a transparent semantic link.
Living things and plants
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 艹 (← 艸) | 140 | くさかんむり (kanmuri) | grass, plant | 花 "flower" (high)37; 茶 "tea" (high); 草 "grass" (high) |
| 犭 (← 犬) | 94 | けものへん (hen) | beast, dog, wild animal | 猫 "cat" (high); 狗 "dog" (high)38; 狼 "wolf" (high) |
| 鳥 | 196 | とりへん (hen); free | bird | 鳴 "to cry, to sound" (high, 口 + 鳥 ideogrammic)39; 鶏 "chicken" (high); 鳩 "pigeon" (high) |
| 魚 | 195 | うおへん / さかなへん (hen) | fish, aquatic animal | 鯨 "whale" (high, by extension)40; 鮭 "salmon" (high); 鮮 "fresh" (medium, from fresh fish) |
| 虫 | 142 | むしへん (hen) | insect, small creature | 蚊 "mosquito" (high)41; 蝶 "butterfly" (high); 蟹 "crab" (high, by extension) |
| 食 | 184 | しょくへん (hen) | food, eating | 飲 "to drink" (high); 飯 "rice, meal" (high); 館 "building" (low, extended from "place where food is served")42 |
| 田 | 102 | たへん (hen); free | cultivated field, agriculture | 畑 "dry field" (high; a kokuji, 火 + 田)43; 町 "town" (medium, fields organised into plots); 男 "man" (medium, 田 + 力, "strength in the field") |
鳴 is the cleanest worked example of the bird family. It is an ideogrammic compound of 口 (mouth) + 鳥 (bird), "the cry of a bird."39 Both pieces carry meaning; neither is phonetic.
鳥が鳴いている。39
"A bird is singing."
The same logic generalises across the family: 鶏 (chicken), 鳩 (pigeon), 鴨 (duck), 鶴 (crane) all carry 鳥 on the right. The left piece is phonetic. A learner who knows 鳥 = bird recognises the meaning class on sight and can spend mental effort on the reading.
Built environment
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 宀 | 40 | うかんむり (kanmuri) | roof, building interior | 家 "house" (high); 宿 "lodging" (high)44; 室 "room" (high) |
| 門 | 169 | もんがまえ (kamae) | gate, door, threshold | 閉 "to shut" (high)45; 開 "to open" (high); 間 "interval" (medium, space between two doorposts) |
| 阝 (left, ← 阜) | 170 | こざとへん (hen) | mound, hill, terrain | 院 "institution" (medium, walled enclosure)46; 防 "to prevent" (medium, earthwork wall); 限 "limit" (medium, territory boundary) |
| 阝 (right, ← 邑) | 163 | おおざと (tsukuri) | village, settlement, town | 都 "metropolis" (high); 部 "section" (medium, from administrative-region sense); 郵 "postal" (high)47 |
| 辶 (← 辵) | 162 | しんにょう (nyō) | movement, going, road | 道 "way, road" (high)48; 進 "to advance" (high); 近 "near" (high) |
| 山 | 46 | やまへん (hen); free | mountain | 岩 "boulder" (high)18; 峠 "mountain pass" (high; a kokuji, 山 + 上 + 下)49; 崩 "to collapse" (medium) |
The 阝 split is positional: left-阝 (こざとへん) is the mound radical, and right-阝 (おおざと) is the village radical. Position alone disambiguates them.505152 The 月 / ⺼ collision has no such positional safety net.
Five more high-value families
The breakdown above already exceeds 30 once 月-moon, 月-flesh, 阝-left, and 阝-right are counted separately. Five additional families are too useful to omit, even outside the strict top-30 framing:
| Radical | Kangxi | Position-name | Meaning family | Example kanji and transparency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 女 | 38 | おんなへん (hen); free | woman, kinship | 姉 "elder sister" (high)53; 妹 "younger sister" (high); 姫 "princess" (medium) |
| 子 | 39 | こへん (hen); free | child, descendant | 孫 "grandchild" (high)54; 字 "character, letter" (low, from child-in-a-house image); 孝 "filial piety" (medium) |
| 馬 | 187 | うまへん (hen) | horse, transport-by-horse | 駅 "station" (high, from horse relay station)55; 騎 "to ride" (high); 駆 "to gallop, to run" (high) |
| 貝 | 154 | かいへん (hen); free | shell, money, value (cowries were currency) | 財 "wealth" (high, shell-as-money)56; 買 "to buy" (medium); 貯 "to save" (medium) |
| 車 | 159 | くるまへん (hen); free | vehicle, wheel | 輸 "to transport" (high)57; 軽 "light (weight)" (medium); 転 "to turn, to roll" (high) |
The 貝 family is the most counter-intuitive entry on the list. 貝 means "shellfish" in modern Japanese, but as a semantic component it marks value, wealth, and money. Cowry shells were currency in ancient China, and the semantic family preserves that history.56 A learner who reads 財, 貯, 貴, 賃, 資, 賞, 販, 購, 賄, 賂 with "shellfish" as the gloss will be lost. With "money / value," they are reading the meaning class directly.
The 51-radical / 75% jōyō coverage figure used above is a working approximation, not a precise threshold.9 The frequency tail is long. Many of the 214 Kangxi radicals appear in only a handful of jōyō kanji each, so a learner meets them only when those specific kanji come up.410
The limit of semantic prediction
Some radicals are indexing-only, not semantic
The strict 部首 is the dictionary-indexing head. The 意符 is the meaning-bearing component of a 形声 kanji. The two usually coincide, but not always.3558
Wikipedia "Radical (Chinese characters)" states the overlap directly: "Usually, the radical is the semantic component."3 Wikipedia "Chinese character classification" repeats the same hedge: "In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary."5 "Usually" and "in most cases" mark the gap.
A worked counterexample: 字 ("character, letter") has 宀 (roof) on top and 子 (child) at the bottom. The dictionary radical is 子 (Kangxi 39), not 宀. The 子 piece is the indexing head, but 字 is etymologically an ideogrammic compound rather than a 形声, so there is no 意符 in the strict sense. The 宀 (roof) gives the meaning hint, "a place where a child learns characters," and the 子 carries the dictionary index.
The point is the same in both framings: the radical-as-meaning-hint is a side effect of the filing decision, not a guarantee. Outlier Linguistics puts the caution more sharply, arguing that kanji radicals "are not designed to help you learn Japanese kanji, and they are not the building blocks of kanji."58
The semantic link can be opaque, narrowed, or extinct
Even within unambiguous 形声 kanji, the link from 意符 to modern Japanese gloss ranges from transparent to historically distant. A reader who expects "every 氵 kanji is about water" will be wrong.59
The water family illustrates the full transparency range. 海, 河, 池, 湖, 流, 泳, 涙, 酒, 汗, 浴 all have 氵 and are transparently water-related.6811 洋 ("ocean, foreign, Western") has 氵 with a medium link. The base sense "great expanse of water" is direct, but the modern sense "Western, foreign" (e.g. 洋食 yōshoku, "Western food") is an extension that the 氵 alone cannot predict.60
法 ("law") has 氵 from an older etymology involving water and the legendary 廌 (a goat-like creature linked to judicial judgment). The 氵 survives in the modern glyph, but the meaning link is opaque without the etymology.13 治 ("to govern, to cure") has 氵 because the kanji originally named a river. "To govern" is a metaphorical extension from "to control water," in the same line as 治水 chisui ("flood control"). The link survives but is narrow.61
The silk-and-thread family runs the same range. 紅 ("crimson") has 糸 because dyes are applied to silk. The modern gloss is the colour itself, with the silk material hidden inside the etymology.36 終 ("end") has 糸 because the original pictograph was "the knot at the end of a cord." The kanji means "end" in any sense, and the 糸 link is invisible without the etymology.35 識 ("to discern, knowledge") has 言 not because the kanji is about speaking but because discernment was understood as articulated through speech.34
The pattern is consistent: a 意符 narrows the search space. It does not deliver the gloss.59
Form collisions: when the same shape is two different radicals
Two semantically distinct radicals can share a printed glyph in modern Japanese typography. The printed form does not distinguish them, but the dictionary head and the meaning family do.242550
Case 1: 月 (moon, Kangxi 74) vs 肉 / ⺼ (flesh, Kangxi 130). Wikipedia "Radical 130" states: "Traditionally, the writing form of the radical character as a left component is hardly distinguishable with Radical 74 (月 'moon')."25 Wiktionary's 月 entry gives the same warning: "Do not confuse 月 with ⺼, a form of 肉 ('flesh, meat') when used as the left-hand radical."24
The moon side covers 朝 ("morning"),21 期 ("period"), 望 ("to look at"). The flesh side covers 肝 ("liver"),22 腸 ("intestine"),23 肺 ("lung"), 胸 ("chest"), 腕 ("arm"), 服 ("clothing," originally body-fitted), 肌 ("skin"). In the Kangxi-era stroke distinction, the two horizontal strokes' right ends are detached from the frame in 月-moon, but connected in ⺼-flesh. That distinction has largely disappeared in modern Japanese typography.2526
Case 2: 阝-left (こざとへん, ← 阜, Kangxi 170, "mound") vs 阝-right (おおざと, ← 邑, Kangxi 163, "village"). This is the same drawn glyph, but two different parent radicals and two different meaning families.505152 The mound side gives 院 ("institution," walled enclosure),46 防 ("to prevent," earthwork wall), 限 ("limit," territory boundary). The village side gives 都 ("metropolis"), 部 ("section"), 郵 ("postal").47
This collision is positional rather than typographic: position alone disambiguates the radical, so the case is less treacherous than the 月 / ⺼ case where position offers no help.
The reliability ceiling
Semantic-component prediction is a hint, not a guarantee. The hint narrows the search space. Its precision depends on the meaning family, the specific kanji, and how much etymological drift has happened since the kanji was coined.595812
Nguyen et al. (2017) measured non-native learners' inferred-meaning accuracy on unfamiliar characters in sentence context. After explicit instruction in semantic radicals, "the pre-test and post-test score increase was significant for the experimental groups, but not for the control group." Post-test accuracy reached 0.86 on trained content.12 The 0.86 ceiling is a useful working number: even with explicit instruction, sentence context, and a known meaning family, inferred meaning is still wrong about one time in seven.
Outlier Linguistics phrases the ceiling functionally: the component "is related to" the meaning. It does not deliver it.59 The practical guidance follows: treat the 意符 as a category cue, not a gloss. When the 意符 plus context fail to converge on a meaning, look the kanji up.
Good to know
The pictograph-to-radical bridge: most top-30 components are themselves jōyō kanji
The shapes 水 火 木 人 口 心 手 言 糸 月 雨 金 女 子 目 耳 馬 鳥 魚 虫 貝 車 門 田 山 are all jōyō kanji that the learner has often already met as standalone characters. The radical form is the same shape, or a positional compression of it, carrying the same meaning. Learning the standalone is half the cost of learning the radical, and the standalone is usually N5 or N4.410
Reading 灬 (four-dot fire) as if it were a water-family shape
A learner who knows 氵 as "three dots water" sometimes parses 無, 熱, 然, 照 as water-related because the four dots at the bottom look like a wider version of the same shape. They are not. 灬 is the ashi-position form of 火 (Kangxi 86, fire), called れっか or れんが. The four dots are fire-feet.15 氵 (Kangxi 85, water) and 灬 (Kangxi 86, fire) file under different radicals and carry opposite-element meanings.
ごはんを炊く。14
"Cook the rice."
Reading every 月 as the moon radical
A learner who treats 肝 (liver), 腸 (intestine), 肺 (lung), 胸 (chest), 腕 (arm) as a moon-related meaning family because they visibly contain 月 will misread every body-part kanji. The left-side 月 in those kanji is the flesh radical ⺼ (Kangxi 130, 肉), not the moon radical (Kangxi 74).242526
The Kangxi-era stroke difference (moon's right ends detached, flesh's connected) is no longer reliably preserved in modern Japanese typography. The flesh radical is far more productive in jōyō kanji than the moon radical. When in doubt about a left-side 月, the body-part reading is the higher-probability bet.2526
意符 reads "meaning mark," paired with 音符 "sound mark"
意符 (ifu) breaks down character by character as 意 (い, "meaning, intent") + 符 (ふ, "mark, token, sign"). The parallel term 音符 (おんぷ) is 音 ("sound") + 符 ("mark"). Reading 意符 as "meaning mark" and 音符 as "sound mark" is the cleanest one-line way to remember which side of a 形声 kanji the term refers to.12 The term is dictionary metavocabulary in Japanese, but the word structure is fully transparent.
Same meaning, different drawn shape by slot: 水 → 氵, 心 → 忄, 火 → 灬, 手 → 扌, 人 → 亻
These five compressions are the most common cases of "the radical changes drawn shape when its slot in the character changes, but the underlying Kangxi entry and the meaning family stay the same." Wiktionary lists 氵, 忄, 灬, 扌, 亻 as position-form variants of their parent radicals (Kangxi 85, 61, 86, 64, 9 respectively).157626364 A learner who has internalised "氵 means water" has also internalised "水 means water." One is the hen form, one is the standalone form, and the variant is not a new piece of vocabulary.
意符, "semantic component," and "meaning radical" are three names for one object
意符 (Japanese linguistic vocabulary), "semantic component" (English linguistic vocabulary), and "meaning radical" (English learner vocabulary) all point at the same thing: the meaning-bearing component of a 形声 kanji.1359 The English-language learner phrase "meaning radical" is a slight category error. The dictionary radical and the semantic component usually coincide, but they are not the same object. When the two come apart (e.g. 字, indexed under 子 but with 宀 as the meaning hint), "semantic component" is the more accurate label.
Kokuji like 畑 and 峠 are entirely semantic, with no sound-mark
国字 (kokuji) are kanji invented in Japan rather than borrowed from Chinese. Two fit directly into the semantic-radical story: 畑 (dry field) is a ligature of 火 + 田, with both pieces semantic;43 峠 (mountain pass) is an ideogrammic compound of 山 + 上 + 下.49 Neither is a 形声 kanji, and neither has a 音符. The entire character is semantic. Kokuji are the cleanest demonstration that the semantic component can be the whole kanji, not just one piece of it.
See also
- What Is Kanji? A Complete Beginner's Introduction
- How to Predict the Reading of an Unknown Kanji Compound: The On+On Default, Jūbako, Yutō, and the Look-It-Up Bucket
- Go-on, Kan-on, Tō-on: The Historical Layers Behind a Kanji's Multiple On'yomi
- How to Look Up a Kanji You Don't Know: Hover, Handwriting, OCR, and Radical Lookup
- The History of Kanji: From Oracle Bones to the Jōyō List