Sorting and indexing English words or those of other languages with roman alphabet is pretty easy, as letters are ordered from A to Z. Chinese characters are much more difficult to handle, as setting up a distinct order for each and every character fails due to the sheer number of characters - there's even no distinguishable upper limit.

Radical 53 in other characters

Radicals can solve the ordering issue. To understand how they work you have to know that Chinese characters (sino-japanese characters, ...) are made of components with its minimal set being around 1000 if I recall correctly (DeFrancis has something on that). Radicals are a special group of those components as they try to (almost) span the whole set (of unknown size) of characters and to some extend are regarded to reflect a semantic aspect of each character. The construct is man-made and thus doesn't reflect an underlying rule of the writing system, so several radical sets exist. The best known set is the group of 214 Kangxi radicals which where used in the Kangxi Dictionary and are still used today, even though there are sets that have been developed later on.

But I want to talk about how those radical forms are called, so allow me to go in medias res.

Some of those radicals are characters themselves, some are only found as components or even as single strokes. While the former can be easily named by there character (e.g. horse) it has proven that distinct names for radical forms are helpful and so for example Herbert A. Giles lists some in his radical table of "A Chinese-English Dictionary" (1912). To give an example 疒 is not used alone as a character but in a character like 病 (bìng, "ill") and is called 病字旁 (bìngzìpáng) literally meaning "character-病 side" as it occurs on the left side of the character for "ill".

I'm looking for a list of those names. One use case will be Eclectus that has a radical table letting you search in several ways, one being the Chinese name of the radical. In the following I'll list the names I found, myself being critical though to what extend it will be possible to setup a fully covering list of those colloquial names.

From "A Chinese-English Dictionary"

This list is from Giles' "A Chinese-English Dictionary" in the second edition from 1912. It is unsure if all those names are still in use today, or if some of them were subject to change in the last nearly 100 years.

Others from German Wikipedia

This is a list of other names from the radical articles of the German Wikipedia. Some are just slight abbreviations compared to the upper table, still being included here though.

I'll continue to collect colloquial names under Eclectus' svn, so check there for updates.