It is found in the names of mountains generally in east Asia.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 636 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

山 is also the 39th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China.

In Taoist cosmology, 山 (mountain) is the nature component of the bagua diagram 艮 gèn.

The radical is also used as an independent Chinese character.