Chinese characters

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For the moth known as the "Chinese character", see Cilix glaucata.
Unless otherwise specified, Chinese text in this article is presented
as simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese, pinyin. If the simplified and
traditional characters are the same, they are written only once.

Chinese characters

Script Logographic

type

Time 13th century BC to present

period

Direction Left-to-right (modern)

Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left (traditional)

Languag Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ryukyuan, Vietnamese, Zhua

es ng, Miao, etc.

Related scripts

Parent Oracle bone script

systems

 Chinese characters

ISO 15924

ISO Hani (500), Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja)

15924

Unicode

Unicode Han
alias

 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International

Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols,

see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets

and transcription delimiters.

 Chinese characters

Hanzi (Chinese character) in traditional (left) and simplified

form (right)

Chinese name

Simplified Chinese 汉字

Traditional Chinese 漢字

Literal meaning "Han characters"

Transcriptions

Vietnamese name

Vietnamese alphabet chữ Hán

chữ Nho

Hán tự

Hán-Nôm 𡨸漢

𡨸儒

Chữ Hán 漢字

Thai name

Thai อักษรจีน

Zhuang name

Zhuang 𭨡倱[1]

Sawgun
 Korean name

Hangul 한자

Hanja 漢字

showTranscriptions

Japanese name

Kanji 漢字

Hiragana かんじ

showTranscriptions

Khmer name

តួអក្សរចិន
Khmer

Chinese characters

show

Scripts

show

Properties

show

Variants

show
 Reforms

show

Homographs

show

Use in particular scripts

 v
 t
 e

Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 漢字; simplified Chinese: 汉

字; pinyin: hànzì; Wade–Giles: han4 tzŭ4; Jyutping: hon3
zi6; lit. 'Han characters') are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.[2]
[3]
 In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages,
and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are
known as kanji. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known
as hanja, retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents,
history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the chữ Hán and
developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized
alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of
writing in the world.[4] By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East
Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout
the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted
writing systems in the world by number of users.
The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the
tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, or were used historically
and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. A college graduate who
is literate in written Chinese knows between three and four thousand
characters, though more are required for specialized fields. [5] In Japan, 2,136
are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji); hundreds more are in
everyday use. Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in
China, the kanji used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese
simplified characters in several respects. There are various national standard
lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain
characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; traditional
characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and, to some extent,
in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are often written in post-Tōyō
kanji simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese
traditional forms. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted
its own simplification campaign, but eventually streamlined its simplification to
be uniform with mainland China.
In modern Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more
characters.[6] Unlike alphabetic writing systems, in which the unit character
roughly corresponds to one phoneme, the Chinese writing system associates
each logogram with an entire syllable, and thus may be compared in some
aspects to a syllabary. A character almost always corresponds to a single
syllable that is also a morpheme.[7] However, there are a few exceptions to this
general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two
characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases
where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase. [8]
Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may
be represented by one of many characters, depending on meaning. A
particular character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite
distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Cognates in the
several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. In
other languages, most significantly in modern Japanese and sometimes in
Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords or to represent
native words independent of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kun'yomi in
Japanese). Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their
pronunciation in a historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired.
These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic
pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

Contents

 1Function
 2Principles of formation
o 2.1Pictograms
o 2.2Simple ideograms
o 2.3Compound ideographs
o 2.4Rebus
 2.4.1Phonetical usage for foreign words
o 2.5Phono-semantic compounds
o 2.6Derivative cognates
 3History
o 3.1Legendary origins
o 3.2Early sign use
o 3.3Oracle bone script
o 3.4Bronze Age: parallel script forms and gradual evolution
o 3.5Unification: seal script, vulgar writing, and proto-clerical
o 3.6Han dynasty
 3.6.1Proto-clerical evolving to clerical
 3.6.2Clerical and clerical cursive
 3.6.3Neo-clerical
 3.6.4Semi-cursive
o 3.7Wei to Jin period
 3.7.1Regular script
 3.7.2Modern cursive
o 3.8Dominance and maturation of regular script
o 3.9Modern history
  4Adaptation to other languages
o 4.1Japanese
o 4.2Korean
 4.2.1North Korea
o 4.3Okinawan
o 4.4Vietnamese
o 4.5Other languages
o 4.6Transcription of foreign languages
 5Simplification
o 5.1Asia
 5.1.1China
 5.1.2Japan
 5.1.3Singapore
 5.1.4Malaysia
 5.1.5Philippines
o 5.2North America
 5.2.1Canada & United States
o 5.3Comparisons of traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese,
and Japanese
 6Written styles
o 6.1Calligraphy
o 6.2Typography and design
 7Variants
o 7.1Regional standards
o 7.2Polysyllabic morphemes
o 7.3Polysyllabic characters
o 7.4Rare and complex characters
 8Number of characters
o 8.1Chinese
o 8.2Japanese
o 8.3Korean
o 8.4Modern creation
 9Indexing
 10See also
 11Notes
 12References
o 12.1Citations
o 12.2Works cited
 13Further reading
 14External links
o 14.1History and construction of Chinese characters
o 14.2Online dictionaries and character reference
o 14.3Chinese characters in computing
o 14.4Early works of historical interest

Function[edit]
This article or section should specify the language of its
non-English content, using {{lang}}, {{transliteration}} for
transliterated languages, and {{IPA}} for phonetic
transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code.
Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be
 used. See why. (October 2021)

When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old
Chinese were generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single
word.[9] Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language
from the Western Zhou period to the present day. It is estimated that about
25–30% of the vocabulary of classic texts from the Warring States period was
polysyllabic, though these words were used far less commonly than
monosyllables, which accounted for 80–90% of occurrences in these texts.
[10]
 The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has
increased the number of homophones.[11] It has been estimated that over two
thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are
polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. [12]
The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words,
written with the characters of the constituent words. Words have also been
created by adding affixes, reduplication, and borrowing from other languages.
[13]
 Polysyllabic words are generally written with one character per syllable. [14]
[a]
 In most cases the character denotes a morpheme descended from an Old
Chinese word.[15]
Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different
morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard
Chinese, one fifth of the 2,400 most common characters have multiple
pronunciations. For the 500 most common characters, the proportion rises to
30%.[16] Often these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In
the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word,
which was often written with the same character. In many cases the
pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example,
many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major
source of the 4th tone in modern Standard Chinese. Scholars now believe
that this tone is the reflex of an Old Chinese *-s suffix, with a range of
semantic functions.[17] For example,

 传/傳 has readings OC *drjon > MC drjwen' >

Mod. chuán 'to transmit' and
*drjons > drjwenH > zhuàn 'a record'.[18] (Middle
Chinese forms are given in Baxter's transcription, in
which H denotes the departing tone.)
 磨 has readings *maj > ma > mó 'to grind' and
*majs > maH > mò 'grindstone'.[18]
 宿 has readings *sjuk > sjuwk > sù 'to stay
overnight' and *sjuks > sjuwH > xiù 'celestial
"mansion"'.[19]
 说/説 has readings *hljot > sywet > shuō 'speak'
and *hljots > sywejH > shuì 'exhort'.[20]
Another common alternation is between voiced and voiceless initials (though
the voicing distinction has disappeared on most modern varieties). This is
believed to reflect an ancient prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the
voiced or voiceless form is the original root. For example,
  见/見 has readings *kens > kenH > jiàn 'to see' and
*gens > henH > xiàn 'to appear'.[21]
 败/敗 has readings *prats > pæjH > bài 'to defeat'
and *brats > bæjH > bài 'to be defeated'.[21] (In this
case the pronunciations have converged in
Standard Chinese, but not in some other varieties.)
 折 has readings *tjat > tsyet > zhé 'to bend' and
*djat > dzyet > shé 'to break by bending'.[22]

Principles of formation[edit]

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character classification

Sun

Mountain

Elephant
Evolution of pictograms

Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies.

A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were
originally pictograms, which depicted the objects denoted, or ideograms, in
which meaning was expressed iconically. The vast majority were written using
the rebus principle, in which a character for a similarly sounding word was
either simply borrowed or (more commonly) extended with a disambiguating
semantic marker to form a phono-semantic compound character.[23]
The traditional six-fold classification (liùshū 六书 / 六書 "six writings") was first
described by the scholar Xu Shen in the postface of his dictionary Shuowen
Jiezi in 100 AD.[24] While this analysis is sometimes problematic and arguably
fails to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing system, it has been
perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use.
Pictograms[edit]
 象形字 xiàngxíngzì
Pictograms are highly stylized and simplified pictures of material objects.
Examples of pictograms include 日 rì for "sun", 月 yuè for "moon",
and 木 mù for "tree" or "wood". Xu Shen placed approximately 4% of
characters in this category. Though few in number and expressing literal
objects, pictograms and ideograms are nonetheless the basis on which all the
more complex characters such as associative compound characters (会意
字/會意字) and phono-semantic characters (形声字/形聲字) are formed.
Pictograms are primary characters in the sense that they, along with
ideograms (indicative characters i.e. symbols), are the building blocks of
associative compound characters (会意字/會意字) and phono-semantic
characters (形声字/形聲字).
Over time pictograms were increasingly standardized, simplified, and stylized
to make them easier to write. Furthermore, the same Kangxi radical character
element can be used to depict different objects. Thus, the image depicted by
most pictograms is not often immediately evident. For example, 口 may
indicate the mouth, a window as in 高 which depicts a tall building as a symbol
of the idea of "tall" or the lip of a vessel as in 富 a wine jar under a roof as
symbol of wealth. That is, pictograms extended from literal objects to take on
symbolic or metaphoric meanings; sometimes even displacing the use of the
character as a literal term, or creating ambiguity, which was resolved through
character determinants, more commonly but less accurately known as
"radicals" i.e. concept keys in the phono-semantic characters.
Simple ideograms[edit]
 指事字 zhǐshìzì
Also called simple indicatives, this small category contains characters that are
direct iconic illustrations. Examples include 上 shàng "up" and 下 xià "down",
originally a dot above and below a line. Indicative characters are symbols for
abstract concepts which could not be depicted literally but nonetheless can be
expressed as a visual symbol e.g. convex 凸, concave 凹, flat-and-level 平.
Compound ideographs[edit]
 会意字 / 會意字 huìyìzì
Also translated as logical aggregates or associative idea characters, these
characters have been interpreted as combining two or more pictographic or
ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning. The canonical example
is 明 bright. 明 is the association of the two brightest objects in the sky the sun
日 and moon 月, brought together to express the idea of "bright". It is
canonical because the term 明白 in Chinese (lit. "bright white") means "to
understand, understand". Adding the abbreviated radical for grass,
cao 艹 above the character, ming, changes it to meng 萌, which means to
sprout or bud, alluding to the heliotropic behavior of plant life. Other
commonly cited examples include 休 "rest" (composed of the
pictograms 人 "person" and 木 "tree") and 好 "good" (composed
of 女 "woman" and 子 "child").
Xu Shen placed approximately 13% of characters in this category, but many
of his examples are now believed to be phono-semantic compounds whose
origin has been obscured by subsequent changes in their form. [25] Peter
Boodberg and William Boltz go so far as to deny that any of the compound
characters devised in ancient times were of this type, maintaining that now-
lost "secondary readings" are responsible for the apparent absence of
phonetic indicators,[26] but their arguments have been rejected by other
scholars.[27]
In contrast, associative compound characters are common among characters
coined in Japan. Also, a few characters coined in China in modern times,
such as 鉑 platinum, "white metal" (see Chemical elements in East Asian
languages) belong to this category.
Rebus[edit]
 假借字 jiǎjièzì
Also called borrowings or phonetic loan characters, the rebus category covers
cases where an existing character is used to represent an unrelated word with
similar or identical pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is then lost
completely, as with characters such as 自 zì, which has lost its original
meaning of "nose" completely and exclusively means "oneself", or 萬 wàn,
which originally meant "scorpion" but is now used only in the sense of "ten
thousand".
Rebus was pivotal in the history of writing in China insofar as it represented
the stage at which logographic writing could become purely phonetic
(phonographic). Chinese characters used purely for their sound values are
attested in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period manuscripts, in
which zhi 氏 was used to write shi 是 and vice versa, just lines apart; the same
happened with shao 勺 for Zhao 趙, with the characters in question being
homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time. [28]
Phonetical usage for foreign words[edit]
Chinese characters are used rebus-like and exclusively for their phonetic
value when transcribing words of foreign origin, such as ancient Buddhist
terms or modern foreign names. For example, the word for the country
"Romania" is 罗马尼亚/羅馬尼亞 (Luó Mǎ Ní Yà), in which the Chinese
characters are only used for their sounds and do not provide any meaning.
[29]
 This usage is similar to that of the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana,
although the Kanas use a special set of simplified forms of Chinese
characters, in order to advertise their value as purely phonetic symbols. The
same rebus principle for names in particular has also been used in Egyptian
hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs.[30] In the Chinese usage, in a few instances, the
characters used for pronunciation might be carefully chosen in order to
connote a specific meaning, as regularly happens for brand names: Coca-
Cola is translated phonetically as 可口可乐/可口可樂 (Kěkǒu Kělè), but the
characters were carefully selected so as to have the additional meaning of
"Delicious and Enjoyable". A more literal translation would be "the Mouth can
be happy", and the phrase in Chinese is technically grammatically sound. [29][30]
Phono-semantic compounds[edit]
 形声字 / 形聲字 Mandarin: xíngshēngzì

Structures of compounds, with red marked positions of radicals

Semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds are by far the

most numerous characters. These characters are composed of at least two
parts. The semantic component suggests the general meaning of the
compound character. The phonetic component suggests the pronunciation of
the compound character. In most cases the semantic indicator is also the 部
首 radical under which the character is listed in dictionaries. In some rare
examples phono-semantic characters may also convey pictorial content. Each
Chinese character is an attempt to combine sound, image, and idea in a
mutually reinforcing fashion.
Examples of phono-semantic characters
include 河 hé "river", 湖 hú "lake", 流 liú "stream", 沖 chōng "surge", 滑 huá "sli
ppery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes
(氵), which is a reduced form of the character 水 shuǐ meaning "water",
indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-
hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator- for instance: 胡 hú has a very
similar pronunciation to 湖 and 可 kě has a similar (though somewhat
different) pronunciation to 河. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old
Chinese *ɡ-ljuŋ[31]) "surge", the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese *k-
ljuŋ[32]), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the
pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic
indicator; the effect of historical sound change means that the composition of
such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.
In general, phonetic components do not determine the exact pronunciation of
a character, but only give a clue as to its pronunciation. While some
characters take the exact pronunciation of their phonetic component, others
take only the initial or final sounds.[33] In fact, some characters' pronunciations
may not correspond to the pronunciations of their phonetic parts at all, which
is sometimes the case with characters after having undergone simplification.
The 8 characters in the following table all take 也 for their phonetic part,
however, as it is readily apparent, none of them take the pronunciation of 也,
which is yě (Old Chinese *lajʔ). As the table below shows, the sound changes
that have taken place since the Shang/Zhou period when most of these
characters were created can be dramatic, to the point of not providing any
useful hint of the modern pronunciation.

8 PHONO-SEMANTIC COMPOUNDS WITH PHONETIC PART 也 (YĚ)[34]

Old
Chin
Mand Canto Japa Mid
Sema Phon ese
Chara arin nese nese dle meani
ntic etic (Baxt
cter (pinyi (jyutpi (rom Chin ng
part part er–
n) ng) aji) ese
Saga
rt)

(original
grammat
ly a
ical
也 pictogra none yě jaa5 ya jiaX *lajʔ
particle;
ph of a
also
vulva)[35]

水
池 （氵） 也 chí ci4 chi ɖje *Cə.lraj pool
water

马/馬
馳/驰 也 chí ci4 chi ɖje *lraj gallop
horse
 8 PHONO-SEMANTIC COMPOUNDS WITH PHONETIC PART 也 (YĚ)[34]

Old
Chin
Mand Canto Japa Mid
Sema Phon ese
Chara arin nese nese dle meani
ntic etic (Baxt
cter (pinyi (jyutpi (rom Chin ng
part part er–
n) ng) aji) ese
Saga
rt)

chí
(Mainlan
弓 bow loosen,
弛 也 d) ci4 chi, shi ɕjeX *l̥ ajʔ
(bend) relax
shǐ
(Taiwan)

spread,
施 㫃 flag 也 shī si1 se, shi ɕje *l̥ aj set up,
use

ground,
dì ji, chi dijH *lˤej-s
earth

地 土 earth 也 dei6 adverbia

l particle
de, di - - - in
Mandari
n

人
他 （亻）p 也 ta tʰa *l̥ ˤaj he, other
erson
tā taa1

女
她 也 - - - she
female

手
拖 （扌）h 㐌 tuō to1 ta, da tʰaH *l̥ ˤaj drag
and

Xu Shen (c. 100 AD) placed approximately 82% of characters into this

category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary (1716 AD) the number is closer to
90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the
Chinese vocabulary.[citation needed] The chữ Nôm characters of Vietnam were created
using this principle.
This method is used to form new characters, for
example 钚 / 鈈 bù ("plutonium") is the metal radical 金 jīn plus the phonetic
component 不 bù, described in Chinese as "不 gives sound, 金 gives
meaning". Many Chinese names of the chemical elements and many
other chemistry-related characters were formed this way. In fact, it is possible
to tell from a Chinese periodic table at a glance which elements are metal
(金), solid nonmetal (石, "stone"), liquid (氵), or gas (气) at standard
temperature and pressure.
Occasionally a bisyllabic word is written with two characters that contain the
same radical, as in 蝴蝶 húdié "butterfly", where both characters have the
insect radical 虫. A notable example is pipa (a Chinese lute, also a fruit,
the loquat, of similar shape) – originally written as 批把 with the hand radical
(扌), referring to the down and up strokes when playing this instrument, which
was then changed to 枇杷 (tree radical 木), which is still used for the fruit,
while the character was changed to 琵琶 when referring to the instrument
(radical 玨).[36] In other cases a compound word may coincidentally share a
radical without this being meaningful.
Derivative cognates[edit]
 转注字 / 轉注字 zhuǎnzhùzì
The smallest category of characters is also the least understood. [37] In the
postface to the Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen gave as an example the
characters 考 kǎo "to verify" and 老 lǎo "old", which had similar Old Chinese
pronunciations (*khuʔ and *C-ruʔ respectively[38]) and may once have been the
same word, meaning "elderly person", but became lexicalized into two
separate words. The term does not appear in the body of the dictionary, and
is often omitted from modern systems.[39]

History[edit]
Comparative evolution from pictograms to abstract shapes, in cuneiform, Egyptian and Chinese
characters

Legendary origins[edit]
According to traditional legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie,
a figure said to have been a scribe to the legendary Yellow Emperor during
the 27th century BC. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the
landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have
invented symbols called zì (字) – the first Chinese characters. The legend
relates that on the day the characters were created, grain rained down from
the sky and that night the people heard ghosts wailing and demons crying
because the human beings could no longer be cheated. [40]
Early sign use[edit]
Main article: Neolithic signs in China
In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found
at Neolithic sites in China, including Jiahu (c.
6500 BC), Dadiwan and Damaidi from the 6th millennium BC, and Banpo (5th
millennium BC). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that
push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years.
[41][42]
 However, because these marks occur singly, without any implied context,
and are made crudely and simply, Qiu Xigui concluded that "we do not have
any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to
conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese
characters."[43] They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in
the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period. [42]
Oracle bone script[edit]
Main article: Oracle bone script
Ox scapula with oracle bone inscription

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the
body of inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and oracle bones from the
late Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1050 BC).[44][45] The earliest of these is dated to
around 1200 BC.[46][47] In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as
"dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, when scholars identified the symbols
on them as Chinese writing. By 1928, the source of the bones had been
traced to a village near Anyang in Henan Province, which was excavated by
the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have
been found.[44]
Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in
communication with royal ancestral spirits. [44] The shortest are only a few
characters long, while the longest are 30 to 40 characters in length. The
Shang king would communicate with his ancestors on topics relating to the
royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and
related topics by means of scapulimancy, and the answers would be recorded
on the divination material itself.[44]
The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system,[48][49] suggesting that
the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second
millennium BC.[50] Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest
surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, it is widely believed that writing
was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon
which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less
durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away. [50]
Bronze Age: parallel script forms and gradual evolution[edit]
The Shi Qiang pan, a bronze ritual basin dated to around 900 BC. Long inscriptions on the surface
describe the deeds and virtues of the first seven Zhou kings.

Main article: Chinese bronze inscriptions

The traditional picture of an orderly series of scripts, each one invented
suddenly and then completely displacing the previous one, has been
conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and
scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. [51] Gradual
evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case.
As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle bone script coexisted as a simplified
form alongside the normal script of bamboo books (preserved in
typical bronze inscriptions), as well as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms
(often clan emblems) found on many bronzes.
Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is clear that, from the Shang
dynasty writing to that of the Western Zhou and early Eastern Zhou, the
mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until assuming the
form that is now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhou in the state
of Qin, without any clear line of division.[52][53] Meanwhile, other scripts had
evolved, especially in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhou
dynasty, including regional forms, such as the gǔwén ("ancient forms") of the
eastern Warring States preserved as variant forms in the Han
dynasty character dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, as well as decorative forms such
as bird and insect scripts.
Unification: seal script, vulgar writing, and proto-clerical[edit]
Calligraphy

 Arabic
 Chinese
 Georgian
 Indian
 Islamic
 Japanese
 Korean
 Mongolian
 Persian
 Tibetan
  Vietnamese
 Western

 v
 t
 e

Seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qin during the
Eastern Zhou dynasty, became standardized and adopted as the formal script
for all of China in the Qin dynasty (leading to a popular misconception that it
was invented at that time), and was still widely used for decorative engraving
and seals (name chops, or signets) in the Han dynasty period. However,
despite the Qin script standardization, more than one script remained in use
at the time. For example, a little-known, rectilinear and roughly executed kind
of common (vulgar) writing had for centuries coexisted with the more formal
seal script in the Qin state, and the popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the
use of writing itself became more widespread.[54] By the Warring States period,
an immature form of clerical script called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical" had
already developed in the state of Qin[55] based upon this vulgar writing, and
with influence from seal script as well.[56] The coexistence of the three scripts –
small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually in the
Qin to early Han dynasties into clerical script – runs counter to the traditional
belief that the Qin dynasty had one script only, and that clerical script was
suddenly invented in the early Han dynasty from the small seal script.
Han dynasty[edit]
Proto-clerical evolving to clerical[edit]
Proto-clerical script, which had emerged by the time of the Warring States
period from vulgar Qin writing, matured gradually, and by the early Western
Han period, it was little different from that of the Qin. [57] Recently discovered
bamboo slips show the script becoming mature clerical script by the middle-
to-late reign of Emperor Wu of the Western Han,[58] who ruled from 141 to
87 BC.
Clerical and clerical cursive[edit]
Contrary to the popular belief of there being only one script per period, there
were in fact multiple scripts in use during the Han period. [59] Although
mature clerical script, also called 八分 (bāfēn)[60] script, was dominant at that
time, an early type of cursive script was also in use by the Han by at least as
early as 24 BC (during the very late Western Han period), [b] incorporating
cursive forms popular at the time, well as many elements from the vulgar
writing of the Warring State of Qin.[61] By around the time of the Eastern Jin
dynasty, this Han cursive became known as 章草 zhāngcǎo (also known as 隶
草 / 隸草 lìcǎo today), or in English sometimes clerical cursive, ancient
cursive, or draft cursive. Some believe that the name, based
on 章 zhāng meaning "orderly", arose because the script was a more orderly
form[62] of cursive than the modern form, which emerged during the Eastern Jin
dynasty and is still in use today, called 今草 jīncǎo or "modern cursive".[63]
Neo-clerical[edit]
Around the mid-Eastern Han period,[62] a simplified and easier-to-write form of
clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms "neo-clerical" (新隶体 / 新隸
體, xīnlìtǐ).[64] By the late Eastern Han, this had become the dominant daily
script,[62] although the formal, mature bāfēn (八分) clerical script remained in
use for formal works such as engraved stelae.[62] Qiu describes this neo-
clerical script as a transition between clerical and regular script, [62] and it
remained in use through the Cao Wei and Jin dynasties.[65]
Semi-cursive[edit]
By the late Eastern Han period, an early form of semi-cursive script appeared,
[64]
 developing out of a cursively written form of neo-clerical script [c] and simple
cursive.[66] This semi-cursive script was traditionally attributed to Liu Desheng
c. 147–188 AD,[65][d] although such attributions refer to early masters of a script
rather than to their actual inventors, since the scripts generally evolved into
being over time. Qiu gives examples of early semi-cursive script, showing that
it had popular origins rather than being purely Liu's invention. [67]
Wei to Jin period[edit]
Regular script[edit]

A page from a Song dynasty publication in a regular script typeface which resembles the

handwriting of Ouyang Xun from Tang Dynasty

Regular script has been attributed to Zhong Yao (c. 151–230 AD), during the

period at the end of the Han dynasty in the state of Cao Wei. Zhong Yao has
been called the "father of regular script". However, some scholars [68] postulate
that one person alone could not have developed a new script which was
universally adopted, but could only have been a contributor to its gradual
formation. The earliest surviving pieces written in regular script are copies of
Zhong Yao's works, including at least one copied by Wang Xizhi. This new
script, which is the dominant modern Chinese script, developed out of a neatly
written form of early semi-cursive, with addition of the pause (顿/頓 dùn)
technique to end horizontal strokes, plus heavy tails on strokes which are
written to the downward-right diagonal. [69] Thus, early regular script emerged
from a neat, formal form of semi-cursive, which had itself emerged from neo-
clerical (a simplified, convenient form of clerical script). It then matured further
in the Eastern Jin dynasty in the hands of the "Sage of Calligraphy", Wang
Xizhi, and his son Wang Xianzhi. It was not, however, in widespread use at
that time, and most writers continued using neo-clerical, or a somewhat semi-
cursive form of it, for daily writing,[69] while the conservative bafen clerical script
remained in use on some stelae, alongside some semi-cursive, but primarily
neo-clerical.[70]
Modern cursive[edit]
Meanwhile, modern cursive script slowly emerged from the clerical cursive
(zhāngcǎo) script during the Cao Wei to Jin period, under the influence of
both semi-cursive and the newly emerged regular script. [71] Cursive was
formalized in the hands of a few master calligraphers, the most famous and
influential of whom was Wang Xizhi.[e]
Dominance and maturation of regular script[edit]
It was not until the Northern and Southern dynasties that regular script rose to
dominant status.[72] During that period, regular script continued evolving
stylistically, reaching full maturity in the early Tang dynasty. Some call the
writing of the early Tang calligrapher Ouyang Xun (557–641) the first mature
regular script. After this point, although developments in the art of calligraphy
and in character simplification still lay ahead, there were no more major
stages of evolution for the mainstream script.
Modern history[edit]
Although most simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the
works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC)
in the 1950s and 60s, the use of some of these forms predates the PRC's
formation in 1949. Caoshu, cursive written text, was the inspiration of some
simplified characters, and for others, some are attested as early as the Qin
dynasty (221–206 BC) as either vulgar variants or original characters.
The first batch of Simplified Characters introduced in 1935 consisted of 324 characters.

One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lufei Kui, who

proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In
the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-
imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China as quickly
as possible. Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were
challenged and subsequently blamed for their problems. Soon, people in the
Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle
in modernising China and therefore proposed that a reform be initiated. It was
suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or
completely abolished. Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th
century, stated that, "If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will
die" (漢字不滅，中國必亡). Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese
characters were blamed for the economic problems in China during that time.
[73]

In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place

within the Kuomintang government, and a large number of the intelligentsia
maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. [74] In
1935, 324 simplified characters collected by Qian Xuantong were officially
introduced as the table of first batch of simplified characters, but they were
suspended in 1936 due to fierce opposition within the party.
The People's Republic of China issued its first round of official character
simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. In
the 1950s and 1960s, while confusion about simplified characters was still
rampant, transitional characters that mixed simplified parts with yet-to-be
simplified parts of characters together appeared briefly, then disappeared.
"Han unification" was an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal
Character Set to map multiple character sets of the so-called CJK languages
(Chinese/Japanese/Korean) into a single set of unified characters and was
completed for the purposes of Unicode in 1991 (Unicode 1.0).
Apart from Chinese ones, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese normative
medium of record-keeping, written historical narratives and official
communication are in adaptations and variations of Chinese script. [75]

Adaptation to other languages[edit]

Current (dark and medium green) and former extension (light green) of the use of Chinese
characters

Countries and regions using Chinese characters as a writing system:

Dark Green: Traditional Chinese used officially (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau)
Green: Simplified Chinese used officially but traditional form is also used in publishing (Singapore,
Malaysia)[76]
Light Green: Simplified Chinese used officially, traditional form in daily use is uncommon
(China, Kokang, and Wa State of Myanmar)
Cyan: Chinese characters are used in parallel with other scripts in respective native languages
(South Korea, Japan)
Yellow: Chinese characters were once used officially, but this is now obsolete (Mongolia, North
Korea, Vietnam)

See also: Chinese family of scripts

The Chinese script spread to Korea together with Buddhism from the 2nd
century BC to 5th century AD (hanja).[77] This was adopted for recording the
Japanese language from the 5th century AD.[f]
Chinese characters were first used in Vietnam during the millennium of
Chinese rule starting in 111 BC. They were used to write Classical Chinese
and adapted around the 13th century to create the chữ Nôm script to write
Vietnamese.
Currently, the only non-Chinese language outside of China that regularly uses
the Chinese script is Japanese. Vietnam abandoned its use in the early
20th century in favour of a Latin-based script, and Korea in the late 20th
century in favour of its homegrown hangul script. Since the education of
Chinese characters is not mandatory in South Korea,[78] the usage of Chinese
character is rapidly disappearing.
Japanese[edit]
Main article: Kanji
Chinese characters adapted to write Japanese words are known as kanji.
Chinese words borrowed into Japanese could be written with Chinese
characters, while native Japanese words could also be written using the
character(s) for a Chinese word of similar meaning. Most kanji have both the
native (and often multi-syllabic) Japanese pronunciation, known as kun'yomi,
and the (mono-syllabic) Chinese-based pronunciation, known as on'yomi. For
example, the native Japanese word katana is written as 刀 in kanji, which
uses the native pronunciation since the word is native to Japanese, while the
Chinese loanword nihontō (meaning "Japanese sword") is written as 日本刀,
which uses the Chinese-based pronunciation. While nowadays loanwords
from non-Sinosphere languages are usually just written in katakana, one of
the two syllabary systems of Japanese, loanwords that were borrowed into
Japanese before the Meiji Period were typically written with Chinese
characters whose on'yomi had the same pronunciation as the loanword itself,
words like Amerika (kanji: 亜米利加, katakana: アメリカ, meaning:
America), karuta (kanji: 歌留多, 加留多, katakana: カルタ, meaning: card,
letter), and tenpura (kanji: 天婦羅, 天麩羅, katakana: テンプラ, meaning:
tempura), although the meanings of the characters used often had no relation
to the words themselves. Only some of the old kanji spellings are in common
use, like kan (缶, meaning: can). Kanji that are used to only represent the
sounds of a word are called ateji (当て字). Because Chinese words have been
borrowed from varying dialects at different times, a single character may have
several on'yomi in Japanese.[79]
Written Japanese also includes a pair of syllabaries known as kana, derived
by simplifying Chinese characters selected to represent syllables of
Japanese. The syllabaries differ because they sometimes selected different
characters for a syllable, and because they used different strategies to reduce
these characters for easy writing: the angular katakana were obtained by
selecting a part of each character, while hiragana were derived from the
cursive forms of whole characters.[80] Modern Japanese writing uses a
composite system, using kanji for word stems, hiragana for inflectional
endings and grammatical words, and katakana to transcribe non-Chinese
loanwords as well as serve as a method to emphasize native words (similar to
how italics are used in Latin-script languages).[81]
Korean[edit]
Main article: Hanja
Throughout most of Korean history as early as the Gojoseon period up until
the Joseon Dynasty, Literary Chinese was the dominant form of written
communication. Although the Korean alphabet hangul was created in 1443, it
did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th
century.[82][83]
Even today, much of the vocabulary, especially in the realms of science and
sociology, comes directly from Chinese. However, due to the lack of tones in
Modern Standard Korean, as the words were imported from Chinese, many
dissimilar characters and syllables took on identical pronunciations, and
subsequently identical spelling in hangul.[84] Chinese characters are sometimes
used to this day for either clarification in a practical manner, or to give a
distinguished appearance, as knowledge of Chinese characters is considered
by many Koreans a high class attribute and an indispensable part of a
classical education. It is also observed that the preference for Chinese
characters is treated as being culturally Confucian.[83]
In Korea, hanja have become a politically contentious issue, with some
Koreans urging a "purification" of the national language and culture by totally
abandoning their use. These individuals encourage the exclusive use of the
native hangul alphabet throughout Korean society and the end to character
education in public schools. Other Koreans support the revival of Hanja in
everyday usage, like in the 1970s and 80s.[85] In South Korea, educational
policy on characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by education
ministers' personal opinions. At present, middle and high school students
(grades 7 to 12) are taught 1,800 characters,[85] albeit with the principal focus
on recognition, with the aim of achieving newspaper literacy. [83] Hanja retains
its prominence, especially in Korean academia, as the vast majority of Korean
documents, history, literature and records (such as the Veritable Records of
the Joseon Dynasty, among others) were written in Literary
Chinese using Hanja as its primary script. Therefore, a good working
knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to
interpret and study older texts from Korea, or anyone who wishes to read
scholarly texts in the humanities. Hanja is also useful for understanding
the etymology of Sino-Korean vocabulary.[86]
There is a clear trend toward the exclusive use of hangul in day-to-day South
Korean society. Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in
newspapers, weddings, place names and calligraphy (although it is nowhere
near the extent of kanji use in day-to-day Japanese society). Hanja is also
extensively used in situations where ambiguity must be avoided, such as
academic papers, high-level corporate reports, government documents, and
newspapers; this is due to the large number of homonyms that have resulted
from extensive borrowing of Chinese words.[87] Characters convey meaning
visually, while alphabets convey guidance to pronunciation, which in turn hints
at meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the phonetic entry for 
기사 gisa yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity had
been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated hanja.
While hanja is sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, native Korean
words are rarely, if ever, written in hanja.
When learning how to write hanja, students are taught to memorize the native
Korean pronunciation for the hanja's meaning and the Sino-Korean
pronunciations (the pronunciation based on the Chinese pronunciation of the
characters) for each hanja respectively so that students know what the
syllable and meaning is for a particular hanja. For example, the name for the
hanja 水 is 물 수 (mul-su) in which 물 (mul) is the native Korean pronunciation
for "water", while 수 (su) is the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the character.
The naming of hanja is similar to if "water" were named "water-aqua", "horse-
equus", or "gold-aurum" based on a hybridization of both the English and the
Latin names. Other examples include 사람 인 (saram-in) for 
人 "person/people", 큰 대 (keun-dae) for 大 "big/large//great", 작을 소 (jakeul-
so) for 小 "small/little", 아래 하 (arae-ha) for 下 "underneath/below/low", 아비 
부 (abi-bu) for 父 "father", and 나라이름 한 (naraireum-han) for 韓 "Han/Korea".
[88]

North Korea[edit]
In North Korea, the hanja system was once completely banned since June
1949 due to fears of collapsed containment of the country; during the
1950s, Kim Il Sung had condemned all sorts of foreign languages (even the
then-newly proposed New Korean Orthography). The ban continued into the
21st century. However, a textbook for university history departments
containing 3,323 distinct characters was published in 1971. In the 1990s,
school children were still expected to learn 2,000 characters (more than in
South Korea or Japan).[89]
After Kim Jong Il, the second ruler of North Korea, died in December 2011, his
successor Kim Jong Un began mandating the use of Hanja as a source of
definition for the Korean language. Currently, it is said that North Korea
teaches around 3,000 Hanja characters to North Korean students, and in
some cases, the characters appear within advertisements and newspapers.
However, it is also said that the authorities implore students not to use the
characters in public.[90] Due to North Korea's strict isolationism, accurate
reports about hanja use in North Korea are hard to obtain.
Okinawan[edit]
Main article: Okinawan language
Chinese characters are thought to have been first introduced to the Ryukyu
Islands in 1265 by a Japanese Buddhist monk. [91] After the Okinawan
kingdoms became tributaries of Ming China, especially the Ryukyu
Kingdom, Classical Chinese was used in court documents, but hiragana was
mostly used for popular writing and poetry. After Ryukyu became a vassal of
Japan's Satsuma Domain, Chinese characters became more popular, as well
as the use of Kanbun. In modern Okinawan, which is labeled as a Japanese
dialect by the Japanese government, katakana and hiragana are mostly used
to write Okinawan, but Chinese characters are still used.
Vietnamese[edit]
Main articles: Chữ Nôm, Literary Chinese in Vietnam, and History of writing in
Vietnam
The first two lines of the classic Vietnamese epic poem The Tale of Kieu, written in the Nôm script
and the modern Vietnamese alphabet. Chinese characters representing Sino-Vietnamese words
are shown in green, characters borrowed for similar-sounding native Vietnamese words in purple,
and invented characters in brown.

In Vietnam, Chinese characters (called Chữ Hán, chữ Nho, or Hán tự in

Vietnamese) are now limited to ceremonial uses, but they were once in
widespread use. Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was used in
Vietnam for all official and scholarly writing.
The oldest writing Chinese materials found in Vietnam is an epigraphy dated
618, erected by local Sui dynasty officials in Thanh Hoa.[92] Around the 13th
century, a script called chữ Nôm was developed to record folk literature in the
Vietnamese language. Similar to Zhuang Sawndip, the Nom script (demotic
script) and its characters formed by fusing phonetic and semantic values of
Chinese characters that resemble Vietnamese syllables. [93] This process
resulted in a highly complex system that was never mastered by more than
5% of the population.[94] The oldest writing Vietnamese chữ Nôm script written
along with Chinese is a Buddhist inscription, dated 1209. [93] In total, about
20,000 Chinese and Vietnamese epigraphy rubbings throughout Indochina
were collected by the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) library in
Hanoi before 1945.[95]
The oldest surviving extant manuscript in Vietnam is a late 15th-century
bilingual Buddhist sutra Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh, which is
currently kept by the EFEO. The manuscript features Chinese texts in larger
characters, and Vietnamese translation in smaller characters in Old
Vietnamese.[96] Every Sino-Vietnamese book in Vietnam after the Phật
thuyết are dated either from 17th century to 20th century, and most are hand-
written/copied works, only few are printed texts. The Institute of Hán-Nôm
Studies's library in Hanoi had collected and kept 4,808 Sino-Vietnamese
manuscripts in total by 1987.[97]
During French colonization in the late 19th and early 20th century, Literary
Chinese fell out of use and chữ Nôm was gradually replaced with the Latin-
based Vietnamese alphabet.[98][99] Currently this alphabet is the main script in
Vietnam, but Chinese characters and chữ Nôm are still used in some activities
connected with Vietnamese traditional culture (e.g. calligraphy).
Other languages[edit]
Several minority languages of south and southwest China were formerly
written with scripts based on Hanzi but also including many locally created
characters. The most extensive is the sawndip script for the Zhuang
language of Guangxi which is still used to this day. Other languages written
with such scripts include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Mulam, Kam, Bai, and Hani.[100] All
these languages are now officially written using Latin-based scripts, while
Chinese characters are still used for the Mulam language. [citation needed] Even today
for Zhuang, according to survey, the traditional sawndip script has twice as
many users as the official Latin script.[101]
The foreign dynasties that ruled northern China between the 10th and 13th
centuries developed scripts that were inspired by Hanzi but did not use them
directly: the Khitan large script, Khitan small script, Tangut script, and Jurchen
script. Other scripts in China that borrowed or adapted a few Chinese
characters but are otherwise distinct include Geba script, Sui script, Yi script,
and the Lisu syllabary.[100]
Transcription of foreign languages[edit]
Main article: Transcription into Chinese characters

Mongolian text from The Secret History of the Mongols in Chinese transcription, with a glossary on
the right of each row

Along with Persian and Arabic, Chinese characters were also used as a

foreign script to write the Mongolian language, where characters were used to
phonetically transcribe Mongolian sounds. Most notably, the only surviving
copies of The Secret History of the Mongols were written in such a manner;
the Chinese characters 忙豁侖紐察 脫[卜]察安 (nowadays pronounced
"Mánghuōlún niǔchá tuō[bo]chá'ān" in Chinese) is the rendering of Mongγol-
un niγuca tobčiyan, the title in Mongolian.
Hanzi was also used to phonetically transcribe the Manchu language in
the Qing dynasty.
According to the Rev. John Gulick: "The inhabitants of other Asiatic nations,
who have had occasion to represent the words of their several languages by
Chinese characters, have as a rule used unaspirated characters for the
sounds, g, d, b. The Muslims from Arabia and Persia have followed this
method ... The Mongols, Manchu, and Japanese also constantly select
unaspirated characters to represent the sounds g, d, b, and j of their
languages. These surrounding Asiatic nations, in writing Chinese words in
their own alphabets, have uniformly used g, d, b, etc., to represent the
unaspirated sounds."[102]

Simplification[edit]
Main articles: Simplified Chinese characters and Japanese script reform
Chinese character simplification is the overall reduction of the number of
strokes in the regular script of a set of Chinese characters.
Asia[edit]
China[edit]
The use of traditional Chinese characters versus simplified Chinese
characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the
medium. Before the official reform, character simplifications were not officially
sanctioned and generally adopted vulgar variants and idiosyncratic
substitutions. Orthodox variants were mandatory in printed works, while the
(unofficial) simplified characters would be used in everyday writing or quick
notes. Since the 1950s, and especially with the publication of the 1964 list,
the People's Republic of China has officially adopted simplified Chinese
characters for use in mainland China, while Hong Kong, Macau, and
the Republic of China (Taiwan) were not affected by the reform. There is no
absolute rule for using either system, and often it is determined by what the
target audience understands, as well as the upbringing of the writer.
Although most often associated with the People's Republic of China,
character simplification predates the 1949 communist victory. Caoshu, cursive
written text, are what inspired some simplified characters, and for others,
some were already in use in print text, albeit not for most formal works. In the
period of Republican China, discussions on character simplification took place
within the Kuomintang government and the intelligentsia, in an effort to greatly
reduce functional illiteracy among adults, which was a major concern at the
time. Indeed, this desire by the Kuomintang to simplify the Chinese writing
system (inherited and implemented by the Chinese Communist Party after its
subsequent abandonment) also nursed aspirations of some for the adoption
of a phonetic script based on the Latin script, and spawned such inventions as
the Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
The People's Republic of China issued its first round of official character
simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964.
A second round of character simplifications (known as erjian, or "second-
round simplified characters") was promulgated in 1977. It was poorly received,
and in 1986 the authorities rescinded the second round completely, while
making six revisions to the 1964 list, including the restoration of three
traditional characters that had been simplified: 叠 dié, 覆 fù, 像 xiàng.
As opposed to the second round, a majority of simplified characters in the first
round were drawn from conventional abbreviated forms, or ancient forms.
[103]
 For example, the orthodox character 來 lái ("come") was written as 来 in
the clerical script (隶书 / 隸書, lìshū) of the Han dynasty. This clerical form
uses one fewer stroke, and was thus adopted as a simplified form. The
character 雲 yún ("cloud") was written with the structure 云 in the oracle bone
script of the Shang dynasty, and had remained in use later as a phonetic loan
in the meaning of "to say" while the 雨 radical was added a semantic indicator
to disambiguate the two. Simplified Chinese simply merges them.
Japan[edit]
Main articles: Kanji, Tōyō kanji, Jōyō kanji, and Shinjitai
In the years after World War II, the Japanese government also instituted a
series of orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms
called shinjitai (新字体, lit. "new character forms"); the older forms were then
labelled the kyūjitai (旧字体, lit. "old character forms"). The number of
characters in common use was restricted, and formal lists of characters to be
learned during each grade of school were established, first the 1850-
character tōyō kanji (当用漢字) list in 1945, the 1945-character jōyō kanji (常
用漢字) list in 1981, and a 2136-character reformed version of the jōyō kanji in
2010. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common
characters were officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of
facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and
periodicals. These are simply guidelines, hence many characters outside
these standards are still widely known and commonly used, especially those
used for personal and place names (for the latter, see jinmeiyō kanji),[citation
needed]
 as well as for some common words such as "dragon" (竜/龍, tatsu) in
which both old and new forms of the character are both acceptable and widely
known amongst native Japanese speakers.
Singapore[edit]
See also: Singapore Chinese characters
Singapore underwent three successive rounds of character simplification.
These resulted in some simplifications that differed from those used
in mainland China.
The first round, consisting of 498 Simplified characters from 502 Traditional
characters, was promulgated by the Ministry of Education in 1969. The
second round, consisting of 2287 Simplified characters, was promulgated in
1974. The second set contained 49 differences from the Mainland China
system; those were removed in the final round in 1976.
In 1993, Singapore adopted the six revisions made by Mainland China in
1986. However, unlike in mainland China where personal names may only be
registered using simplified characters, parents have the option of registering
their children's names in traditional characters in Singapore. [104]
It ultimately adopted the reforms of the People's Republic of China in their
entirety as official, and has implemented them in the educational system.
However, unlike in China, personal names may still be registered in traditional
characters.
Malaysia[edit]
Malaysia started teaching a set of simplified characters at schools in 1981,
which were also completely identical to the Mainland China simplifications.
Chinese newspapers in Malaysia are published in either set of characters,
typically with the headlines in traditional Chinese while the body is in
simplified Chinese.
Although in both countries the use of simplified characters is universal among
the younger Chinese generation, a large majority of the older Chinese literate
generation still use the traditional characters. Chinese shop signs are also
generally written in traditional characters.
Philippines[edit]
In the Philippines, most Chinese schools and businesses still use the
traditional characters and bopomofo, owing from influence from the Republic
of China (Taiwan) due to the shared Hokkien heritage. Recently, however,
more Chinese schools now use both simplified characters and pinyin. Since
most readers of Chinese newspapers in the Philippines belong to the older
generation, they are still published largely using traditional characters.
North America[edit]
Canada & United States[edit]
Public and private Chinese signage in the United States and Canada most
often use traditional characters.[105] There is some effort to get municipal
governments to implement more simplified character signage due to recent
immigration from mainland China.[106] Most community newspapers printed in
North America are also printed in traditional characters.
Comparisons of traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, and
Japanese[edit]
The following is a comparison of Chinese characters in the Standard Form of
National Characters, a common traditional Chinese standard used in Taiwan;
the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, the standard for Mainland
Chinese jiantizi (simplified); and the jōyō kanji, the standard for
Japanese kanji. Generally, the jōyō kanji are more similar
to fantizi (traditional) than jiantizi are to fantizi. "Simplified" refers to having
significant differences from the Taiwan standard, not necessarily being a
newly created character or a newly performed substitution. The characters in
the Hong Kong standard and the Kangxi Dictionary are also known as
"Traditional", but are not shown.

Comparisons of a sample of traditional Chinese characters, simplified Chinese characters,

and simplified Japanese characters in their modern standardized forms (

 v
 t
 e
)
Chinese
Japanese Meaning
Traditional Simplified
Simplified in mainland China only, not Japan
(Some radicals were simplified)
電 电 電 electricity

買 买 買 buy

車 车 車 car, vehicle

紅 红 紅 red

無 无 無 nothing

東 东 東 east

馬 马 馬 horse

風 风 風 wind

愛 爱 愛 love

時 时 時 time

鳥 鸟 鳥 bird

島 岛 島 island

語 语 語 language, word

頭 头 頭 head

魚 鱼 魚 fish

園 园 園 garden

長 长 長 long, grow

紙 纸 紙 paper

書 书 書 book, document

見 见 見 watch, see

響 响 響 echo, sound
Simplified in Japan, not Mainland China
(In some cases this represents the adoption
of different variants as standard)

假 假 仮 false, day off, borrow

佛 佛 仏 Buddha

德 德 徳 moral, virtue

拜 拜 拝 kowtow, pray to, worship

黑 黑 黒 black

冰 冰 氷 ice

兔 兔 兎 rabbit
妒 妒 妬 jealousy

每 每 毎 every

壤 壤 壌 soil

步 步 歩 step

巢 巢 巣 nest

惠 惠 恵 grace

莓 莓 苺 strawberry
Simplified differently in Mainland China and Japan

圓 圆 円 circle

聽 听 聴 listen

實 实 実 real

證 证 証 certificate, proof

龍 龙 竜 dragon

賣 卖 売 sell

龜 龟 亀 turtle, tortoise

藝 艺 芸 art, arts

戰 战 戦 fight, war

繩 绳 縄 rope, criterion

繪 绘 絵 picture, painting

鐵 铁 鉄 iron, metal

圖 图 図 picture, diagram

團 团 団 group, regiment

圍 围 囲 to surround

轉 转 転 turn

廣 广 広 wide, broad

惡 恶 悪 bad, evil, hate

豐 丰 豊 abundant

腦 脑 脳 brain

雜 杂 雑 miscellaneous

壓 压 圧 pressure, compression
雞/鷄 鸡 鶏 chicken

總 总 総 overall

價 价 価 price

樂 乐 楽 fun, music

歸 归 帰 return, revert

氣 气 気 air

廳 厅 庁 hall, office

發 发 発 emit, send

澀 涩 渋 astringent

勞 劳 労 labour

劍 剑 剣 sword

歲 岁 歳 age, years

權 权 権 authority, right

燒 烧 焼 burn

贊 赞 賛 praise

兩 两 両 two, both

譯 译 訳 translate

觀 观 観 look, watch

營 营 営 camp, battalion

處 处 処 processing

齒 齿 歯 teeth

驛 驿 駅 station

櫻 樱 桜 cherry

產 产 産 production

藥 药 薬 medicine

嚴 严 厳 strict, severe

讀 读 読 read

顏 颜 顔 face

關 关 関 concern, involve, relation

顯 显 顕 prominent, to show
Simplified (almost) identically in Mainland China and Japan

畫 画 画 picture

聲 声 声 sound, voice

學 学 学 learn

體 体 体 body

點 点 点 dot, point

麥 麦 麦 wheat

蟲 虫 虫 insect

舊 旧 旧 old, bygone, past

會 会 会 be able to, meeting

萬 万 万 ten-thousand

盜 盗 盗 thief, steal

寶 宝 宝 treasure

國 国 国 country

醫 医 医 medicine

雙 双 双 pair

晝 昼 昼 noon, day

觸 触 触 contact

來 来 来 come

黃 黄 黄 yellow

區 区 区 ward, district

Written styles[edit]
Main article: Chinese script styles
Sample of the cursive script by Chinese Tang dynasty calligrapher Sun Guoting, c. 650 AD

There are numerous styles, or scripts, in which Chinese characters can be

written, deriving from various calligraphic and historical models. Most of these
originated in China and are now common, with minor variations, in all
countries where Chinese characters are used.
The Shang dynasty oracle bone script and the Zhou dynasty scripts found
on Chinese bronze inscriptions are no longer used; the oldest script that is still
in use today is the Seal Script (篆書(篆书), zhuànshū). It evolved organically
out of the Spring and Autumn period Zhou script, and was adopted in a
standardized form under the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. The seal
script, as the name suggests, is now used only in artistic seals. Few people
are still able to read it effortlessly today, although the art of carving a
traditional seal in the script remains alive; some calligraphers also work in this
style.
Scripts that are still used regularly are the "Clerical Script" (隸書(隶书), lìshū)
of the Qin dynasty to the Han dynasty, the Weibei (魏碑, wèibēi), the "regular
script" (楷書(楷书), kǎishū), which is used mostly for printing, and the "semi-
cursive script" (行書(行书), xíngshū), used mostly for handwriting.
The cursive script (草書(草书), cǎoshū, literally "grass script") is used
informally. The basic character shapes are suggested, rather than explicitly
realized, and the abbreviations are sometimes extreme. Despite being cursive
to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable and the
characters often illegible to the untrained eye, this script (also known as draft)
is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Some of
the simplified Chinese characters adopted by the People's Republic of China,
and some simplified characters used in Japan, are derived from the cursive
script. The Japanese hiragana script is also derived from this script.
There also exist scripts created outside China, such as the
Japanese Edomoji styles; these have tended to remain restricted to their
countries of origin, rather than spreading to other countries like the Chinese
scripts.
Calligraphy[edit]
Main article: Chinese calligraphy

Chinese calligraphy of mixed styles written by Song dynasty (1051–1108 AD) poet Mifu. For

centuries, the Chinese literati were expected to master the art of calligraphy.

The art of writing Chinese characters is called Chinese calligraphy. It is

usually done with ink brushes. In ancient China, Chinese calligraphy is one of
the Four Arts of the Chinese Scholars. There is a minimalist set of rules of
Chinese calligraphy. Every character from the Chinese scripts is built into a
uniform shape by means of assigning it a geometric area in which the
character must occur. Each character has a set number of brushstrokes; none
must be added or taken away from the character to enhance it visually, lest
the meaning be lost. Finally, strict regularity is not required, meaning the
strokes may be accentuated for dramatic effect of individual style. Calligraphy
was the means by which scholars could mark their thoughts and teachings for
immortality, and as such, represent some of the most precious treasures that
can be found from ancient China.
Typography and design[edit]

The first four characters of Thousand Character Classic in different type and script styles. From
right to left: seal script, clerical script, regular script, Ming, and sans-serif.

Three major families of typefaces are used in Chinese typography:

  Ming or Song
 Sans-serif
 Regular script
Ming and sans-serif are the most popular in body text and are based on
regular script for Chinese characters akin to Western serif and sans-
serif typefaces, respectively. Regular script typefaces emulate regular script.
The Song typeface (宋体 / 宋體, sòngtǐ) is known as the Ming typeface (明
朝, minchō) in Japan, and it is also somewhat more commonly known as
the Ming typeface (明体 / 明體, míngtǐ) than the Song typeface
in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The names of these styles come from
the Song and Ming dynasties, when block printing flourished in China.
Sans-serif typefaces, called black typeface (黑体 / 黑體, hēitǐ) in Chinese and
Gothic typeface (ゴシック体) in Japanese, are characterized by simple lines
of even thickness for each stroke, akin to sans-serif styles such
as Arial and Helvetica in Western typography.
Regular script typefaces are also commonly used, but not as common as
Ming or sans-serif typefaces for body text. Regular script typefaces are often
used to teach students Chinese characters, and often aim to match the
standard forms of the region where they are meant to be used. Most
typefaces in the Song dynasty were regular script typefaces which resembled
a particular person's handwriting (e.g. the handwriting of Ouyang Xun, Yan
Zhenqing, or Liu Gongquan), while most modern regular script typefaces tend
toward anonymity and regularity.

Variants[edit]
Main article: Variant Chinese character

Variants of the Chinese character for guī 'turtle', collected c. 1800 from printed sources. The one at
left is the traditional form used today in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 龜, though 龜 may look slightly
different, or even like the second variant from the left, depending on your font (see Wiktionary).
The modern simplified forms used in China, 龟, and in Japan, 亀, are most similar to the variant in
the middle of the bottom row, though neither is identical. A few more closely resemble the modern
simplified form of the character for diàn 'lightning', 电.

Five of the 30 variant characters found in the preface of the Imperial (Kangxi) Dictionary which are
not found in the dictionary itself. They are 為 (爲) wèi "due
to", 此 cǐ "this", 所 suǒ "place", 能 néng "be able to", 兼 jiān "concurrently". (Although the form
of 為 is not very different, and in fact is used today in Japan, the radical 爪 has been obliterated.)
Another variant from the preface, 来 for 來 lái "to come", also not listed in the dictionary, has been
adopted as the standard in Mainland China and Japan.
The character 次 in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. If you have an
appropriate font installed, you can see the corresponding character in Vietnamese: 次.

Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters mostly

occupying the x-height, with ascenders or descenders on some letters),
Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area in which the
components of every character are written to fit in order to maintain a uniform
size and shape, especially with small printed characters in Ming and sans-
serif styles. Because of this, beginners often practise writing on squared
graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes use the term "Square-Block
Characters" (方块字 / 方塊字, fāngkuàizì), sometimes translated
as tetragraph,[107] in reference to Chinese characters.
Despite standardization, some nonstandard forms are commonly used,
especially in handwriting. In older sources, even authoritative ones, variant
characters are commonplace. For example, in the preface to the Imperial
Dictionary, there are 30 variant characters which are not found in the
dictionary itself.[108] A few of these are reproduced at right.
Regional standards[edit]
The nature of Chinese characters makes it very easy to
produce allographs (variants) for many characters, and there have been many
efforts at orthographical standardization throughout history. In recent times,
the widespread usage of the characters in several nations has prevented any
particular system becoming universally adopted and the standard form of
many Chinese characters thus varies in different regions.
Mainland China adopted simplified Chinese characters in 1956. They are also
used in Singapore and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese characters are used
in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Postwar Japan has used its own less
drastically simplified characters, Shinjitai, since 1946, while South Korea has
limited its use of Chinese characters, and Vietnam and North Korea have
completely abolished their use in favour of Vietnamese alphabet and Hangul,
respectively.
The standard character forms of each region are described in:

 The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern

Chinese for Mainland China.
 The List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese
Characters for Hong Kong.
 The Standard Form of National Characters for
Taiwan.
 The list of Jōyō kanji for Japan.
 The Han-Han Dae Sajeon (de facto) for Korea.
In addition to strictness in character size and shape, Chinese characters are
written with very precise rules. The most important rules regard the strokes
employed, stroke placement, and stroke order. Just as each region that uses
Chinese characters has standardized character forms, each also has
standardized stroke orders, with each standard being different. Most
characters can be written with just one correct stroke order, though some
words also have many valid stroke orders, which may occasionally result in
different stroke counts. Some characters are also written with different stroke
orders due to character simplification.
Polysyllabic morphemes[edit]
Chinese characters are primarily morphosyllabic, meaning that most
Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic and are written with a single character,
though in modern Chinese most words are disyllabic and dimorphemic,
consisting of two syllables, each of which is a morpheme. In modern Chinese
10% of morphemes only occur as part of a given compound. However, a few
morphemes are disyllabic, some of them dating back to Classical Chinese.
[109]
 Excluding foreign loan words, these are typically words for plants and small
animals. They are usually written with a pair of phono-semantic compound
characters sharing a common radical. Examples are 蝴蝶 húdié "butterfly"
and 珊瑚 shānhú "coral". Note that the 蝴 hú of húdié and
the 瑚 hú of shānhú have the same phonetic, 胡, but different radicals
("insect" and "jade", respectively). Neither exists as an independent
morpheme except as a poetic abbreviation of the disyllabic word.
Polysyllabic characters[edit]
In certain cases compound words and set phrases may be contracted into
single characters. Some of these can be considered logograms, where
characters represent whole words rather than syllable-morphemes, though
these are generally instead considered ligatures or abbreviations (similar
to scribal abbreviations, such as & for "et"), and as non-standard. These do
see use, particularly in handwriting or decoration, but also in some cases in
print. In Chinese, these ligatures are called héwén (合文), héshū (合书, 合書)
or hétǐzì (合体字, 合體字), and in the special case of combining two
characters, these are known as "two-syllable Chinese characters" (双音节汉
字, 雙音節漢字).
A commonly seen example is the Double Happiness symbol 囍, formed as a
ligature of 喜喜 and referred to by its disyllabic name (simplified Chinese: 双
喜; traditional Chinese: 雙喜; pinyin: shuāngxǐ). In handwriting, numbers are
very frequently squeezed into one space or combined – common ligatures
include 廿 niàn, "twenty", normally read as 二十 èrshí, 卅 sà, "thirty", normally
read as 三十 sānshí, and 卌 xì "forty", normally read as 四十 "sìshí".
Calendars often use numeral ligatures in order to save space; for example,
the "21st of March" can be read as 三月廿一.[8]
Modern examples particularly include Chinese characters for SI units. In
Chinese these units are disyllabic and standardly written with two characters,
as 厘米 límǐ "centimeter" (厘 centi-, 米 meter) or 千瓦 qiānwǎ "kilowatt".
However, in the 19th century these were often written via compound
characters, pronounced disyllabically, such as 瓩 for 千瓦 or 糎 for 厘米 –
some of these characters were also used in Japan, where they were
pronounced with borrowed European readings instead. These have now fallen
out of general use, but are occasionally seen. Less systematic examples
include 圕 túshūguǎn "library", a contraction of 圖書館 (simplified: 图书馆).[110]
[111]
 Since polysyllabic characters are often non-standard, they are often
excluded in character dictionaries.
The use of such contractions is as old as Chinese characters themselves, and
they have frequently been found in religious or ritual use. In the Oracle Bone
script, personal names, ritual items, and even phrases such as 受又(祐) shòu
yòu "receive blessings" are commonly contracted into single characters. A
dramatic example is that in medieval manuscripts 菩薩 púsà "bodhisattva"
(simplified: 菩萨) is sometimes written with a single character formed of a 2×2
grid of four 十 (derived from the grass radical over two 十).[8] However, for the
sake of consistency and standardization, the CCP seeks to limit the use of
such polysyllabic characters in public writing to ensure that every character
only has one syllable.[112]
Conversely, with the fusion of the diminutive -er suffix in Mandarin, some
monosyllabic words may even be written with two characters, as in 花儿, 花
兒 huār "flower", which was formerly disyllabic.
In most other languages that use the Chinese family of scripts, notably
Korean, Vietnamese, and Zhuang, Chinese characters are typically
monosyllabic, but in Japanese a single character is generally used to
represent a borrowed monosyllabic Chinese morpheme (the on'yomi), a
polysyllabic native Japanese morpheme (the kun'yomi), or even (in rare
cases) a foreign loanword. These uses are completely standard and
unexceptional.
Rare and complex characters[edit]
Often a character not commonly used (a "rare" or "variant" character) will
appear in a personal or place name in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese (see Chinese name, Japanese name, Korean name,
and Vietnamese name, respectively). This has caused problems as many
computer encoding systems include only the most common characters and
exclude the less often used characters. This is especially a problem for
personal names which often contain rare or classical, antiquated characters.
One man who has encountered this problem is Taiwanese politician Yu Shyi-
kun, due to the rarity of the last character (堃; pinyin: kūn) in his name.
Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including using
software to combine two existing, similar characters, including a picture of the
character, or, especially as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply substituting a
homophone for the rare character in the hope that the reader would be able to
make the correct inference. Taiwanese political posters, movie posters etc.
will often add the bopomofo phonetic symbols next to such a character.
Japanese newspapers may render such names and words
in katakana instead, and it is accepted practice for people to write names for
which they are unsure of the correct kanji in katakana instead. [citation needed]
There are also some extremely complex characters which have
understandably become rather rare. According to Joël Bellassen (1989), the
most complex Chinese character is  /𪚥 (U+2A6A5) zhé  listen (help·info),
meaning "verbose" and containing 64 strokes; this character fell from use
around the 5th century. It might be argued, however, that while containing the
most strokes, it is not necessarily the most complex character (in terms of
difficulty), as it simply requires writing the same 16-stroke
character 龍 lóng (lit. "dragon") four times in the space for one. Another 64-
stroke character is  /𠔻 (U+2053B) zhèng composed of 興 xīng/xìng (lit.
"flourish") four times.
One of the most complex characters found in modern Chinese
dictionaries[g] is 齉 (U+9F49) (nàng,  listen (help·info), pictured below, middle
image), meaning "snuffle" (that is, a pronunciation marred by a blocked nose),
with "just" thirty-six strokes. Other stroke-rich characters include 靐 (bìng),
with 39 strokes and 䨻 (bèng), with 52 strokes, meaning the loud noise of
thunder. However, these are not in common use. The most complex character
that can be input using the Microsoft New Phonetic IME 2002a for traditional
Chinese is 龘 (dá, "the appearance of a dragon flying"). It is composed of the
dragon radical represented three times, for a total of 16 × 3 = 48 strokes.
Among the most complex characters in modern dictionaries and also
in frequent modern use are 籲 (yù, "to implore"), with 32 strokes; 鬱 (yù,
"luxuriant, lush; gloomy"), with 29 strokes, as in 憂鬱 (yōuyù,
"depressed"); 豔 (yàn, "colorful"), with 28 strokes; and 釁 (xìn, "quarrel"), with
25 strokes, as in 挑釁 (tiǎoxìn, "to pick a fight"). Also in occasional modern
use is 鱻 (xiān "fresh"; variant of 鮮 xiān) with 33 strokes.

In Japanese, an 84-stroke kokuji exists:  , normally read taito. It is

composed of triple "cloud" character (䨺) on top of the abovementioned triple
"dragon" character (龘). Also meaning "the appearance of a dragon in flight",
it has been pronounced おとど otodo, たいと taito, and だいと daito.[113] The
most elaborate character in the jōyō kanji list is the 29-stroke 鬱, meaning
"depression" or "melancholy".

The most complex Chinese character still in use may be [according to whom?] 
/𰻞 (U+30EDE) (biáng, pictured right, bottom), with 58 strokes, which refers
to biangbiang noodles, a type of noodle from China's Shaanxi province. This
character along with the syllable biáng cannot be found in dictionaries. The
fact that it represents a syllable that does not exist in any Standard
Chinese word means that it could be classified as a dialectal character.

Zhé, "verbose"
 
 

Zhèng (unknown meaning)
 

Nàng, "poor enunciation due to snuffle"

 

Taito, "the appearance of a dragon in flight"

 

alternative form of Taito

 


 Biáng, a kind of noodle in Shaanxi

Number of characters[edit]
The total number of Chinese characters from past to present remains
unknowable because new ones are being developed all the time – for
instance, brands may create new characters when none of the existing ones
allow for the intended meaning – or they have been invented by whoever
wrote them and have never been adopted as official characters. Chinese
characters are theoretically an open set and anyone can create new
characters, though such inventions are rarely included in official character
sets.[114] The number of entries in major Chinese dictionaries is the best means
of estimating the historical growth of character inventory.
Number of characters in monolingual Chinese dictionaries
Year Name of dictionary Number of characters
100 Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) 9,353[115]
230 Shenglei (聲類) 11,520[115]
350 Zilin (字林) 12,824[115]
543 Yupian (玉篇) 16,917[116][117]
601 Qieyun (切韻) 12,158[118]
732 Tangyun (唐韻) 15,000[115]
753 Yunhai jingyuan (韻海鏡源) 26,911[119]
997 Longkan Shoujian (龍龕手鑒) 26,430[120]
1011 Guangyun (廣韻) 26,194[117][121]
1066 Leipian (類篇) 31,319[119]
1039 Jiyun (集韻) 53,525[122]
1615 Zihui (字彙) 33,179[117][123]
1675 Zhengzitong (正字通) 33,440[124]
1716 Kangxi Zidian (康熙字典) 47,035[117][125]
1915 Zhonghua Da Zidian (中華大字典) 48,000[117]
1989 Hanyu Da Zidian (漢語大字典) 54,678[115]
1994 Zhonghua Zihai (中华字海) 85,568[126]
2004 Yitizi Zidian (異體字字典) 106,230[127]
Number of characters in bilingual Chinese dictionaries
Year Country Name of dictionary Number of characters
2003 Japan Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典) 50,305
2008 South Korea Han-Han Dae Sajeon (漢韓大辭典) 53,667

Even the Zhonghua Zihai does not include characters in the Chinese family of

scripts created to represent non-Chinese languages, except the unique
characters in use in Japan and Korea. Characters formed by Chinese
principles in other languages include the roughly 1,500 Japanese-
made kokuji given in the Kokuji no Jiten,[128] the Korean-made gukja, the over
10,000 Sawndip characters still in use in Guangxi, and the almost
20,000 Nôm characters formerly used in Vietnam.[citation needed] More divergent
descendants of Chinese script include Tangut script, which created over
5,000 characters with similar strokes but different formation principles to
Chinese characters.
Modified radicals and new variants are two common reasons for the ever-
increasing number of characters. There are about 300 radicals and 100 are in
common use. Creating a new character by modifying the radical is an easy
way to disambiguate homographs among xíngshēngzì pictophonetic
compounds. This practice began long before the standardization of Chinese
script by Qin Shi Huang and continues to the present day. The traditional 3rd-
person pronoun tā (他 "he, she, it"), which is written with the "person radical",
illustrates modifying significs to form new characters. In modern usage, there
is a graphic distinction between tā (她 "she") with the "woman
radical", tā (牠 "it") with the "animal radical", tā (它 "it") with the "roof radical",
and tā (祂 "He") with the "deity radical", One consequence of modifying
radicals is the fossilization of rare and obscure variant logographs, some of
which are not even used in Classical Chinese. For instance, he 和 "harmony,
peace", which combines the "grain radical" with the "mouth radical", has
infrequent variants 咊 with the radicals reversed and 龢 with the "flute radical".
Chinese[edit]

Cumulative frequency of simplified Chinese characters in Modern Chinese text [129]

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

通用规范汉字表

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

常用國字標準字體表

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:

常用字字形表

Chinese characters (Chinese: 字; pinyin: zì, meaning the semiotic sign,

symbol, or glyph part) should not be confused with Chinese words
(Chinese: 詞; pinyin: cí, meaning phrases or vocabulary words, consisting
from a group of characters or possibly a single character), as the majority of
modern Chinese words, unlike their Old Chinese and Middle
Chinese counterparts, are more frequently written with two or more
characters, each character representing one syllable and/or morpheme.
Knowing the meanings of the individual characters of a word will often allow
the general meaning of the word to be inferred, but this is not always the
case.
Studies in China have shown that literate individuals know and use between
3,000 and 4,000 characters. Specialists in classical literature or history, who
would often encounter characters no longer in use, are estimated to have a
working vocabulary characters between 5,000 and 6,000. [5]
In China, which uses simplified Chinese characters, the Xiàndài Hànyǔ
Chángyòng Zìbiǎo (现代汉语常用字表, List of Commonly Used Characters in
Modern Chinese) lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-
common characters, while the Xiàndài Hànyǔ Tōngyòng Zìbiǎo (现代汉语通用
字表, Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese) lists 7,000
characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. In June 2013,
the Tōngyòng Guīfàn Hànzì Biǎo (通用规范汉字表, Table of General Standard
Chinese Characters) became the current standard, replacing the previous two
lists. It includes 8,105 characters, 3,500 as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and
1,605 as tertiary. GB 2312, an early version of the national encoding standard
used in the People's Republic of China, has 6,763 code points. GB 18030, the
modern, mandatory standard, has a much higher number. The Hànyǔ
Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì (汉语水平考试, Chinese Proficiency Test) after July 2021
would cover 3,000 characters and 11,092 words at its highest level (level
nine).[130][131][132]
In Taiwan, which uses traditional Chinese characters, the Ministry of
Education's Chángyòng Guózì Biāozhǔn Zìtǐ Biǎo (常用國字標準字體表, Chart
of Standard Forms of Common National Characters) lists 4,808 characters;
the Cì Chángyòng Guózì Biāozhǔn Zìtǐ Biǎo (次常用國字標準字體表, Chart of
Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common National Characters) lists another
6,341 characters. The Chinese Standard Interchange Code (CNS11643)—the
official national encoding standard—supports 48,027 characters in its 1992
version (currently over 100,500 characters), while the most widely used
encoding scheme, BIG-5, supports only 13,053. The Test of Chinese as a
Foreign Language (華語文能力測驗, TOCFL) covers 8,000 words at its
highest level (level six). The Taiwan Benchmarks for the Chinese Language
(臺灣華語文能力基準, TBCL), a guideline developed to describe levels of
Chinese language proficiency, covers 3,100 characters and 14,470 words at
its highest level (level seven).[133][134]
In Hong Kong, which uses traditional Chinese characters, the Education and
Manpower Bureau's Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu (Chinese: 常用字字形
表; Jyutping: soeng4jung6zi6 zi6jing4 biu2), intended for use in elementary and
junior secondary education, lists a total of 4,759 characters.
In addition, there are a number of dialect characters (方言字) that are not
generally used in formal written Chinese but represent colloquial terms in
nonstandard varieties of Chinese. In general, it is common practice to use
standard characters to transcribe Chinese dialects when obvious cognates
with words in Standard Mandarin exist. However, when no obvious cognate
could be found for a word, due to factors like irregular sound change or
semantic drift in the meanings of characters, or the word originates from a
non-Chinese source like a substratum from an earlier displaced language or a
later borrowing from another language family, then characters are borrowed
and used according to the rebus principle or invented in an ad hoc manner to
transcribe it. These new characters are generally phonosemantic compounds
(e.g., 侬, 'person' in Min), although a few are compound ideographs (e.g., 孬,
'bad', in Northeast Mandarin). Except in the case of written Cantonese, there
is no official orthography, and there may be several ways to write a dialectal
word, often one that is etymologically correct and one or several that are
based on the current pronunciation (e.g., 觸祭 (etymological) vs. 戳鸡/戳雞
(phonetic), 'eat' (low-register) in Shanghainese). Speakers of a dialect will
generally recognize a dialectal word if it is transcribed according to phonetic
considerations, while the etymologically correct form may be more difficult or
impossible to recognize. For example, few Gan speakers would recognize the
character meaning 'to lean' in their dialect, because this character (隑) has
become archaic in Standard Mandarin. The historically "correct" transcription
is often so obscure that it is uncovered only after considerable scholarly
research into philology and historical phonology and may be disputed by other
researchers.
As an exception, written Cantonese is in widespread use in Hong Kong, even
for certain formal documents, due to the former
British colonial administration's recognition of Cantonese for use for official
purposes. In Taiwan, there is also a body of semi-official characters used to
represent Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka. For example, the vernacular
character 㓾, pronounced cii11 in Hakka, means "to kill".[135] Other varieties of
Chinese with a significant number of speakers, like Shanghainese Wu, Gan
Chinese, and Sichuanese, also have their own series of characters, but these
are not often seen, except on advertising billboards directed toward locals and
are not used in formal settings except to give precise transcriptions of witness
statements in legal proceedings. Written Standard Mandarin is the preference
for all mainland regions.
Japanese[edit]
See also: List of jōyō kanji and Jinmeiyō kanji § List of jinmeiyō kanji
Kanji for 剣道 (Kendo), pronounced differently from the Korean term 劍道 (Kumdo), or the Chinese
words 劍道 (jiàndào;[h] it is more common to use the expressions 劍術 jiànshù or 劍法 jiànfǎ in
Chinese).

In Japanese, there are 2,136 jōyō kanji (常用漢字, lit. "frequently used

Chinese characters") designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education;
these are taught during primary and secondary school. The list is a
recommendation, not a restriction, and many characters missing from it are
still in common use.[146]
One area where character usage is officially restricted is in names, which may
contain only government-approved characters. Since the jōyō kanji list
excludes many characters that have been used in personal and place names
for generations, an additional list, referred to as the jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢
字, lit. "kanji for use in personal names"), is published. [147] It currently contains
983 characters.[148]
Today, a well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3,500
characters.[149] The kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験, Nihon Kanji Nōryoku
Kentei Shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests a speaker's ability to
read and write kanji. The highest level of the kanji kentei tests on
approximately 6,000 kanji (corresponding to the kanji characters list of the JIS
X 0208).[150][151]
Korean[edit]
Basic Hanja for educational use (漢文敎育用基礎漢字) are a subset of
1,800 Hanja defined in 1972 by a South Korea education standard. 900
characters are expected to be learnt by middle school students and a further
900 at high school.[152]
In March 1991, the Supreme Court of Korea published the Table of Hanja for
Personal Name Use (人名用追加漢字表), which allowed a total of
2,854 hanja in South Korean given names.[153] The list expanded gradually, and
until 2015 there are 8,142 hanja (including the set of basic hanja) permitted
using in Korean names.[154]
Modern creation[edit]
New characters can in principle be coined at any time, just as new words can
be, but they may not be adopted. Significant historically recent coinages date
to scientific terms of the 19th century. Specifically, Chinese coined new
characters for chemical elements – see Chemical elements in East Asian
languages – which continue to be used and taught in schools in China and
Taiwan. In Japan, in the Meiji era (specifically, late 19th century), new
characters were coined for some (but not all) SI units, such as 粁 (米 "meter"
+ 千 "thousand, kilo-") for kilometer. These kokuji (Japanese-coinages) have
found use in China as well – see Chinese characters for SI units for details.
While new characters can be easily coined by writing on paper, they are
difficult to represent on a computer – they must generally be represented as a
picture, rather than as text – which presents a significant barrier to their use or
widespread adoption. Compare this with the use of symbols as names in 20th
century musical albums such as Led Zeppelin IV (1971) and Love Symbol
Album (1993); an album cover may potentially contain any graphics, but in
writing and other computation these symbols are difficult to use.

Indexing[edit]
Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for arranging Chinese
characters in Chinese dictionaries. The great majority of these schemes have
appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly
widespread use. This is the system of radicals (see for example, the 214 so-
called Kangxi radicals).
Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several
ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese
characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by
radical, and radicals containing fewer strokes come before radicals containing
more strokes (radical-and-stroke sorting). Under each radical, characters are
listed by their total number of strokes. It is often also possible to search for
characters by sound, using pinyin (in Chinese dictionaries), zhuyin (in
Taiwanese dictionaries), kana (in Japanese dictionaries) or hangul (in Korean
dictionaries). Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes,
and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well.
For instance, to look up the character where the sound is not known,
e.g., 松 (pine tree), the user first determines which part of the character is the
radical (here 木), then counts the number of strokes in the radical (four), and
turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of
the dictionary). Under the number "4" for radical stroke count, the user
locates 木, then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the
listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-
index giving remainder stroke numbers (for the non-radical portions of
characters) and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains
four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number
given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or
she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every
character containing each radical, and if the user knows the number of
strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the
correct page directly.
Another dictionary system is the Four-Corner Method, in which characters are
classified according to the shape of each of the four corners.
Most modern Chinese dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English
speakers use the traditional radical-based character index in a section at the
front, while the main body of the dictionary arranges the main character
entries alphabetically according to their pinyin spelling.[citation needed] To find a
character with unknown sound using one of these dictionaries, the reader
finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates
the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the
character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the
main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically.

See also[edit]

Radical index on Wiktionary

Total strokes index on Wiktionary

 Adoption of Chinese literary culture

 Character amnesia
 Chinese character encoding
 Chinese family of scripts
 Chinese input methods for computers
 Chinese numerals, how numbers are written with
Chinese characters
 Chinese punctuation
 Digraph
 Eight Principles of Yong
 Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
 List of languages written in Chinese characters and
derivatives of Chinese characters
 Romanization of Chinese
 Stroke order
 Transcription into Chinese characters
Notes[edit]
1. ^ Abbreviations are occasionally used – see § Polysyllabic
characters.
2. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 132–133 provides archaeological evidence
for this dating, in contrast to unsubstantiated claims dating
the beginning of cursive anywhere from the Qin to the
Eastern Han.
3. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 140–141 mentions examples of neo-clerical
with "strong overtones of cursive script" from the late Eastern
Han.
4. ^ Liu is said to have taught Zhong Yao and Wang Xizhi.
5. ^ Wáng Xīzhī is so credited in essays by other calligraphers
in the 6th to early 7th centuries, and most of his extant
pieces are in modern cursive script.[71]
6. ^ cf. Inariyama Sword

7. ^   (U+9F49) nàng is found, for instance, on p. 707

of 漢英辭典(修訂版) A Chinese–English Dictionary, (Revised
Edition) Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,
Beijing, 1995. ISBN 978-7-5600-0739-7.
8. ^ Jiàndào is the pronunciation of the Modern Standard
Chinese, deriving from the Beijing Mandarin. There are other
pronunciations of the varieties of Chinese, deriving its
pronunciation from the Middle Chinese, as like:
 Southern Min (Taiwan): kiàm-tō (Pe̍h-ōe-jī / kiàm-tō
(Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn)[136][137]
 Hakka Chinese (Sixian dialect): kiam-tho (Pha̍k-fa-sṳ) /
giam-to (Taiwanese Hakka Romanization System)[138][139]
 Yue Chinese (Hong Kong): gim3-dou6 (Jyutping)[140][141]
 Wu Chinese (Shanghainese): cie3-dau2 (Romanization of
Wu Chinese)[142][143]
 Wu Chinese (Suzhou dialect): cie523-
dau231 (Romanization of Wu Chinese)[144][145]

References[edit]
Citations[edit]
1. ^ Guǎngxī Zhuàngzú zìzhìqū shǎoshù mínzú gǔjí zhěnglǐ
chūbǎn guīhuà lǐngdǎo xiǎozǔ 广西壮族自治区少数民族古籍
整理出版规划领导小组, ed. (1989). Sawndip Sawdenj – Gǔ
Zhuàng zì zìdiǎn 古壮字字典 [Dictionary of the Old Zhuang
Script] (2nd ed.). Nanning: Guangxi minzu
chubanshe. ISBN 978-7-5363-0614-1.
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521-74533-8.
4. ^ CCTV.com (18 November 2009). "History of Chinese
Writing Shown in the Museums". Artintern.net. Archived
from the original on 21 November 2009. Retrieved 20
March 2010.
5. ^ Jump up to:a b Norman 1988, p. 73.
6. ^ Wood, Clare Patricia; Connelly, Vincent
(2009). Contemporary Perspectives on Reading and
Spelling. New York: Routledge. p. 203. ISBN 978-0-415-
49716-9. Often, the Chinese character can function as an
independent unit in sentences, but sometimes it must be
paired with another character or more to form a word. [...]
Most words consist of two or more characters, and more
than 80 per cent make use of lexical compounding of
morphemes (Packard, 2000).
7. ^ "East Asian Languages and Chinese Characters".
Pinyin.info. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
8. ^ Jump up to:a b c Mair, Victor (2 August 2011). "Polysyllabic
Characters in Chinese Writing". Language Log.
9. ^ Norman 1988, p. 58.
10. ^ Wilkinson 2012, p. 22.
11. ^ Norman 1988, p. 112.
12. ^ Yip 2000, p. 18.
13. ^ Norman 1988, pp. 155–156.
14. ^ Norman 1988, p. 74.
15. ^ Norman 1988, pp. 74–75.
16. ^ Swofford, Mark (2010). "Chinese Characters with Multiple
Pronunciations". Pinyin.info. Retrieved 4 July 2016.
17. ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 315–317.
18. ^ Jump up to:a b Baxter (1992), p. 315.
19. ^ Baxter (1992), p. 316.
20. ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 197, 305.
21. ^ Jump up to:a b Baxter (1992), p. 218.
22. ^ Baxter (1992), p. 219.
23. ^ Norman 1988, pp. 58–61.
24. ^ Norman 1988, pp. 67–69.
25. ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, p. 261.
26. ^ Boltz 1994, pp. 104–110.
27. ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, pp. 265–268.
28. ^ Boltz 1994, p. 169.
29. ^ Jump up to:a b Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. (2011). The
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30. ^ Jump up to:a b Wright, David (2000). Translating Science:
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31. ^ Baxter 1992, p. 750.
32. ^ Baxter 1992, p. 810.
33. ^ Williams.
34. ^ "Yě" 也. zhongwen.com (in Chinese). Retrieved 17
February 2015.
35. ^ The Shuowen Jiezi gives the origin of 也 as "女陰也", or
'female yin [organ]'. (The 也 in the definition itself is a
declarative sentence final particle.) By the Classical period
(6th century BC), the original definition had fallen into disuse,
and all appearances of the character in texts of that period
and in later in Literary Chinese use it as a phonetic loan for
the grammatical particle. In addition to serving as a classical
particle, it has acquired the modern Vernacular Chinese
meaning of 'also'.
36. ^ Hanyu Da Cidian
37. ^ Norman 1988, p. 69.
38. ^ Baxter 1992, pp. 771, 772.
39. ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, pp. 260–261.
40. ^ Yang, Lihui; An, Deming (2008). Handbook of Chinese
Mythology. Oxford University Press. pp. 84–86. ISBN 978-0-
19-533263-6.
41. ^ "Carvings May Rewrite History of Chinese
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original on 8 July 2007. Retrieved 19 May 2007.; "Chinese
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Retrieved 17 November 2007.
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Writing' Found in China". BBC News.
43. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 31.
44. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Kern 2010, p. 1.
45. ^ Keightley 1978, p. xvi.
46. ^ Bagley, Robert (2004). "Anyang writing and the origin of
the Chinese writing system". In Houston, Stephen (ed.). The
First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process.
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Retrieved 3 April 2019.
47. ^ Boltz, William G. (1999). "Language and Writing".
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Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of
Civilization to 221 BC. Cambridge University Press.
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48. ^ Boltz (1986), p. 424.
49. ^ Keightley (1996).
50. ^ Jump up to:a b Kern 2010, p. 2.
51. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 63–64, 66, 86, 88–89, 104–107, 124.
52. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 59–150.
53. ^ Chén Zhāoróng 2003.
54. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 104.
55. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 59, 104–107.
56. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 119.
57. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 123.
58. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 119, 123–124.
59. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 130.
60. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 121.
61. ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 131, 133.
62. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Qiu 2000, p. 138.
63. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 131.
64. ^ Jump up to:a b Qiu 2000, pp. 113, 139.
65. ^ Jump up to:a b Qiu 2000, p. 139.
66. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 142.
67. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 140.
68. ^ Transcript of lecture 《楷法無欺》 by 田英
章[https://web.archive.org/web/20110711134656/http://
www.guoyiguan.com/cgi-bin/topic.cgi?forum=8&topic=1
Archived 2011-07-11 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved
2010-05-22.
69. ^ Jump up to:a b Qiu 2000, p. 143.
70. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 144.
71. ^ Jump up to:a b Qiu 2000, p. 148.
72. ^ Qiu 2000, p. 145.
73. ^ Yen, Yuehping (2005). Calligraphy and Power in
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74. ^ "Jiǎnhuà zì de zuótiān, jīntiān hé míngtiān"  简化字的昨天、
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from the original on 14 July 2011. Retrieved 17
January 2010.
75. ^ "...East Asia had been among the first regions of the world
to produce written records of the past. Well into modern
times Chinese script, the common script across East Asia,
served—with local adaptations and variations—as the
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Works cited[edit]
 This article incorporates text from The Chinese recorder and missionary
journal, Volume 3, a publication from 1871, now in the public domain in the
United States.

 Baxter, William H. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology.

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-012324-1.
 Boltz, William G. (1986). "Early Chinese Writing". World
Archaeology. 17 (3): 420–
436. doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979980. JSTOR 124705.
 ——— (1994). The origin and early development of the Chinese
writing system. New Haven: American Oriental Society. ISBN 978-0-
940490-78-9.
 Coulmas, Florian (1991). The writing systems of the world.
Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-18028-9.
 Hannas, Wm. C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of
Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1892-0.
 Keightley, David (1978). Sources of Shang history: the oracle-bone
inscriptions of bronze-age China. Berkeley: University of California
Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02969-9.
 ——— (1996). "Art, Ancestors, and the Origins of Writing in
China". Representations. 56 (56): 68–
95. doi:10.1525/rep.1996.56.1.99p0343q. JSTOR 2928708.
 Kern, Martin (2010). "Early Chinese literature, beginnings through
Western Han". In Owen, Stephen (ed.). The Cambridge History of
Chinese Literature, vol. 1: To 1375. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. pp. 1–115. ISBN 978-0-521-85558-7.
 Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
 Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1984). Middle Chinese: a study in historical
phonology. Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press. ISBN 978-0-7748-0192-8.
  Qiu, Xigui (2000). Chinese writing. Translated by Gilbert L. Mattos;
Jerry Norman. Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and The
Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. ISBN 978-1-
55729-071-7. (English translation of Wénzìxué Gàiyào 文字學概要,
Shangwu, 1988.)
 Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton
University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01468-5.
 Sampson, Geoffrey; Chen, Zhiqun (2013). "The reality of compound
ideographs". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 41 (2): 255–
272. JSTOR 23754815. (preprint)
 Wilkinson, Endymion (2012). Chinese History: A New Manual.
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 84. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard-Yenching Institute; Harvard University Asia
Center. ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8.
 Williams, C. H. Semantic vs. phonetic decoding strategies in non-
native readers of Chinese (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). Archived (PDF) from
the original on 9 October 2022.
 Yip, Po-ching (2000). The Chinese Lexicon: A Comprehensive
Survey. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-15174-0.
 Yong, Heming; Peng, Jing (2008). Chinese Lexicography: A History
from 1046 BC to AD 1911. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-
156167-2.
 Zhou, Youguang (2003). The Historical Evolution of Chinese
Languages and Scripts. Translated by Zhang Liqing. Columbus:
National East Asian Languages Resource Center, Ohio State
University. ISBN 978-0-87415-349-1.

Further reading[edit]
 Galambos, Imre (2006). Orthography of Early
Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated
Manuscripts (PDF). Budapest: Eötvös Loránd
University. ISBN 978-963-463-811-7.
Early works of historical interest

 Samuel Wells Williams (1842). Easy lessons in

Chinese: or progressive exercises to facilitate the
study of that language. Printed at the Office of the
Chinese Repository.
 Herbert Allen Giles (1892). A Chinese-English
dictionary, Volume 1. B. Quaritch. p. 1415.
 P. Poletti (1896). A Chinese and English dictionary,
arranged according to radicals and sub-radicals.
Printed at the American Presbyterian mission
press.
 William Edward Soothill (1900). The student's four
thousand [characters] and general pocket
dictionary (2 ed.). American Presbyterian Mission
Press.
 John Chalmers (1882). An account of the structure
of Chinese characters under 300 primary forms:
after the Shwoh-wan, 100 A.D., and the phonetic
Shwoh-wan, 1833. Trübner & co.
  Chinese and English dictionary: compiled from
reliable authors. American Tract Society. 1893.
 Joseph Edkins (1876). Introduction to the study of
the Chinese characters. Trübner & co. p. 314.
 Walter Henry Medhurst (1842). Chinese and
English dictionary: containing all the words in the
Chinese imperial dictionary; arranged according to
the radicals. 2 volumes. Parapattan: Walter Henry
Medhurst.
 Tai Tung (Dai Tong 戴侗) (1954). The Six Scripts
Or the Principles of Chinese Writing. Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-60515-
2. Translated by L.C. Hopkins with a Memoir of the
Translator by W. Perceval Yetts

External links[edit]

Look up :ko:부록:한문 교육용 기초 한자 1800 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chinese character.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: English-Hanzi

History and construction of Chinese characters[edit]

 Excerpt from Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness
of Writing Systems by John DeFrancis, 1989 by the
University of Hawai'i Press. Used by permission of
the University of Hawai'i Press.
Online dictionaries and character reference[edit]
 Chinese Text Project Dictionary Comprehensive
character dictionary including data for all Chinese
characters in Unicode, and exemplary usage from
early Chinese texts.
 Evolution of Chinese Characters
 Richard Sears, Chinese Etymology
 Da, Jun, Chinese text computing – statistics on use
of Chinese characters
Chinese characters in computing[edit]
 Unihan Database: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
references, readings, and meanings for all the
 Chinese and Chinese-derived characters in
the Unicode character set
 Daoulagad Han – Mobile OCR hanzi dictionary,
OCR interface to the UniHan database
Early works of historical interest[edit]
 Chinese and English dictionary: compiled from
reliable authors. American Tract Society. 1893.
Retrieved 15 May 2011.
 Kangxi (Emperor of China) (1842). Chinese and
English dictionary: containing all the words in the
Chinese imperial dictionary; arranged according to
the radicals, Volume 1. Printed at Parapattan.
Retrieved 15 May 2011.
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