Radicals are typically simpler characters, or different variants of simpler characters, which combine with other radicals to make a more complex character. People can only make so many unique ideographs for the huge number of words and morphemes that make up a language. Combining already existing ideographs together to form a compound ideograph is a very convenient solution to make many more words. While there are thousands of Chinese characters (well over 45,000) that exist, it is said that nearly all characters used in daily life are made up of just 214 radicals. 