3-Stroke Chinese Characters
Every Chinese character with exactly 3 strokes in the HSK 1-6 vocabulary, grouped by radical. Stroke count is a stable indexing signal for dictionaries, handwriting input, and fast character recall.
18 characters18 with HSK level15 radical groups
一 (one) · 3 characters
乙 (second) · 2 characters
丿 (slash) · 1 character
人 (person) · 1 character
十 (ten) · 1 character
口 (mouth) · 1 character
大 (big) · 1 character
子 (child) · 1 character
小 (small) · 1 character
山 (mountain) · 1 character
工 (work) · 1 character
己 (oneself) · 1 character
干 (dry) · 1 character
门 (gate) · 1 character
飞 (fly) · 1 character
Why stroke count matters
Every Chinese character has a fixed stroke count, counted with standardised rules from the 1988 GB 13000 spec. It matters for three workflows:
- Dictionary lookup. Paper dictionaries and many apps sort entries by stroke count after radical, so knowing how many strokes a character has lets you find it without pinyin.
- Handwriting input. Stroke-based keyboards (Wubi, Cangjie, stroke-count IME) rank candidates partly by stroke total.
- Recall. Low-stroke characters (1-5) are almost all HSK 1-2 and high frequency; mid-stroke (6-10) cluster at HSK 3-4; high-stroke (11+) skew HSK 5-6. Learning by stroke bucket doubles as a rough frequency curriculum.
Compare other counts: 1-stroke, 2-stroke, 4-stroke, 5-stroke, 6-stroke, 7-stroke, 8-stroke, 9-stroke.