（らん）Ran – A mythical bird
（ライ、り、レイ）Ri – A Chinese oriole ( a kind of bird )
Some kanji characters are formed by repeating the basic radical character two, three or even four times such as 林 or hayashi or 晶. My personal favorite is 姦 “kashimashii” which is made up from the basic radical for woman written three times. It means “noisy”. Here are a few more examples of kanji with repeated radicals.
（ショウ）Shou – Many horses – 30 strokes
（ セン ）fresh – 30 strokes
large group of horses traveling in a line – 34 strokes
In the following kanji, the basic radicals have been repeated four times to produce 64 strokes.
(てつ）Many, numerous (words)
The big hitters in the kanji stroke department are the following. This kanji (おういちざ) – has an incredible 79 strokes.
But the winner here weighing in at an incredible 84 strokes is “Daito”:
According to this site, the last two kanji (ouichiza and daito) were invented by a playwright for a play during the Edo period. However this fact hasn’t been substantiated so it is doubtful as to whether this could be recognized as an official kanji. It doesn’t appear in any of the dictionaries I have checked and is not in popular use or even known about by most Japanese people.
According to jisho.org 䯂 is the kanji with the highest number of strokes at 34.
All of this information is not a definitive guide and is posted to inspire anyone who has the time and resources to look into this further. I also wrote this for fun and because I hadn’t found any articles about this in English.
My main sources were:
