Is the official radical for 巨 “工” or “匚”? In this question, we can clearly see the origin of 巨 is 矩, which is originally formed from 工 + 大 (corrupted into 矢). However, nowadays 巨 has lost the left hand side of 工, and so naturally the radical appears to be &quot;匚&quot;.
Some dictionaries list 巨 as having 工, and some as 匚 radical. For example, Hanping (using CC-EDICT) says it's 工, but Baidu (obviously not authoritative) and Pleco say it's 匚. Even some native speakers I talked to cannot agree whether it's 工 or 匚, and some say they were taught that it is 匚 very early in education.
Is there a fairly authoritative, widely accepted source on which radical 巨 falls under?
Since radicals are dictionary headers, &quot;what is the radical of X&quot; is dependent on the dictionary you're looking at.
The most internationally-agreed-upon dictionary radicals for Chinese characters would be the Kangxi Dictionary, which lists it under 「工」. Thankfully, most dictionaries have sets of radicals which are derived from the Kangxi list, and most dictionaries are in agreement with Kangxi's classification.


My edition of Pleco doesn't list the radical as 「匚」.