When appearing at the left side of a Chinese character, the radical transforms into 忄, which consists of three strokes.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 1,115 characters (out of 40,000) to be found under this radical.

心 is also the 98th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China.

Two associated indexing components, 忄 and ⺗, are affiliated to the principal indexing component 心.

As a single radical the Chinese character means heart.