I’m sure this is not the first post on this topic. On wanikani 頁 radical means geoduck. When seen in the wild, the 頁 kanji seems to mean “page”, ページ. Does anybody know if 頁 is commonly used outside of wanikani to represent a large shellfish or is this mostly an internal wanikani mnemonic for the radical?
It never means anything geoduck related outside of WK. Only page.
Edit: it means shale. Is that something that has to do with shell?
Edit 2: it aint
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It’s called おおがい in Japanese (big clam). WK just chose a specific big clam to make it more interesting. That reading is on the Jisho page you have there.
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O.O why don’t they have it in the meanings
Well, I am the first reply in that thread 
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Because it’s just the name of the radical, more so than a meaning. Maybe it does mean it literally somewhere, but it’s just the name as far as I know.
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Japanese people also use radicals in the same way it’s taught in WK?
I thought they used route memorization strictly
The radicals still all have names, even if they mostly learn by rote memorization. Sometimes those names just reflect a convenient description of the shape or something, rather than true etymology (I don’t know the history of this one, though).
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In the real world, radicals don’t have names as far as I know
What do you mean by that? Japanese people have to call radicals something, don’t they?
I mean, they test radical names on things like Kanken, but I’m not sure if you’re saying things like Kanken aren’t “the real world.”
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you’d think since they’re supposed to brute force the meaning of this one they’d call it page radical (actually you wouldn’t think that because you’re not dumb like me but you get what I mean)
Thanks! And yeah I saw the jisho page, actually that’s what made me write this post in the first place. I just wanted to read some opinions of someone who knows Japanese well and has had some hands-on experience with this particular character. I mean calling it geoduck instead of large shell sure helps to remember it, but if it’s mostly just used to mean page then 
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I mean, yes, the kanji 頁 means page, and you might see it as that usage, but I don’t think it gets referred to that way as a radical, and it appears as a radical way more often than it does as a kanji meaning page.
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Aahhh, okay, that makes sense. Thanks.
Looking up the history, the original character was a drawing of a kneeling person, with their head emphasized, which is why かしら is one of the readings. The kanji data should probably include “head” as a meaning. This is why it shows up in so many body part kanji related to the head.
The fact that it is now written with the bottom part looking like 貝 is a fluke of history. It never had any relation to shellfish originally, it just got transformed from “drawing of a kneeling person” to 頁 over time, and people came to call that おおがい because it looks like 貝 but it’s bigger.
I’ll have to look for more info later why it came to mean page.
Maybe @Jonapedia knows. That is, assuming it means page in Chinese at all, which might not be the case.
EDIT: Oh, it shared a reading with 葉 (leaf), so it was used in its place at some point, and the leaf meaning morphed to page. Not sure when or where those changes took place. In any case, the page meaning is just a result of borrowing a sound-alike character, not because the shape related to page.
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Well, now everything makes even more sense. I just googled its history too. Super interesting.
Do you happen to know the use of the かしら reading on there? 
I tried to click my way to some example or specification, but got nothing. 
(doing a sentence search for the big clam radical + かしら also yielded nothing.)
かしら makes me think of head (of an organization, like a yakuza boss), or head of a doll (I think it’s also used). Maybe I just don’t know how to use this site? 
Are they actually referring to the use of 頁 in 頭 when saying かしら is a reading? (I find this confusing). ^^;
I would say… Don’t use 頁 to write the word かしら. It’s not a special meaning of かしら, it does just mean “head”. But it’s a rare reading for a kanji that is already rare to begin with, and かしら is not the most common word for head either. Dictionaries that aim for completeness will show かしら as a reading for it, but that doesn’t mean you’d actually encounter it.
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Thanks for the explanation! ^>^ (I won’t be using it anytime soon. I got curious is all)
But, I guess, the かしら reading for 頭 does come from 頁 then.