Radical 97 or radical melon (瓜部) meaning "melon" is one of the 23 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 5 strokes (6 strokes in Japanese).

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 55 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

瓜 is also the 113th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China.

• Large seal script character
• Small seal script character

There is a design nuance between the form of 瓜 in modern Japanese and in other languages. Traditionally, the character consists of five strokes. In Japanese kanji simplification, however, the third stroke (i.e. a vertical-horizontal turning stroke) was broken into two strokes, and 瓜 became a six-stroke radical character. This change also applies to hyōgai kanji.

• Fazzioli, Edoardo (1987). Chinese calligraphy : from pictograph to ideogram : the history of 214 essential Chinese/Japanese characters. calligraphy by Rebecca Hon Ko. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-774-1.
• Lunde, Ken (Jan 5, 2009). "Appendix J: Japanese Character Sets" (PDF). CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing (Second ed.). Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-51447-1.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Radical 097.

• Unihan Database - U+74DC