Chinese characters

The traditional six-fold classification of Chinese characters (六書; 六书; liùshū; 'six writings') was first described by the scholar Xu Shen in the postface of his Shuowen Jiezi dictionary c. 100 CE.[9] While this analysis is occasionally problematic, arguably failing to fully capture the nature of the Chinese writing system, it has proven resilient and pervasive, and continues to serve as a model for those studying the language. Broadly, in order to create meaning Chinese characters make use of sound, abstract idea, and graphical symbol together, such that each dimension mutually reinforces the others.

From top to bottom: graphical evolution of the pictograms 日; 'Sun', 山; 'mountain', and 象; 'elephant'

One of several strategies is used to assign characters to spoken words. A relatively small number of characters, Pictograms are representational pictures of physical objects. In practice, their forms are highly stylised and simplified from centuries of iteration: examples include 日; rì; 'sun', 月; yuè; 'moon', and 木; mù; 'tree'. Xu Shen placed approximately 4% of all characters into this category. Though few in number and limited in their scope, pictograms and ideograms form the basis on which more complex characters are derived. Over time, pictograms became increasingly stylised, simplified, and standardised, in order to make them easier to write.

If being used pictographically, the same component can ultimately be used to represent any number of distinct physical objects. As such, what a pictogram is depicting is often not immediately evident. For example, within a given character the radical ⼝ 'MOUTH' often carries a meaning related to mouths, but within 高—a pictogram of a tall building—it instead depicts a window, ultimately lending to the character's meaning of 'tallness'. In another instance, the same 'mouth' radical depicts the lip of a vessel in the pictogram 畐. In turn, this character is combined with the ⼧ 'ROOF' radical to form 富: a wine jar under a roof, symbolising 'wealth'. These are examples of processes whereby pictograms can be extended from their original concrete meanings to take on additional layers of metaphor and synecdoche, which sometimes even displace the pictogram's original, literal meaning. Over time, this process sometimes creates excess ambiguity between graphically or phonetically similar characters, which is then usually resolved through adding additional components to disambiguate the characters in question. This can be done to create new pictograms, but usually instead results in characters that fall under the other categories in this classification.

Also called simple indicatives, this small category contains characters that are direct illustrations of abstract concepts. Examples include 上; 'up' and 下; 'down', originating as dots above and below a line respectively. Indicative characters are symbols for abstract concepts which could not be depicted literally but nonetheless can be expressed as a visual symbol: for example, 凸; 'convex', 凹; 'concave', and 平; 'flat-and-level'.

Also translated as logical aggregates or associative idea characters, characters in this class are formed by combining two or more pictographs or ideographs to suggest a new, synthetic meaning. The canonical example is 明; míng; 'bright', often interpreted as the juxtaposition of the two brightest objects in the sky: ⽇ 'SUN', and ⽉ 'MOON', together expressing their shared quality of brightness. Though the historicity of this particular etymology has come into question with recent scholarship, it is definitively a canonical reading: for example, the term 明白 has a meaning of 'understanding'. The addition of the abbreviated radical 艹 'GRASS' on top results in the compound ideograph 萌; méng; 'to sprout', alluding to the heliotropic behaviour of plant life. Other commonly cited examples include 休; 'rest' (composed of pictographs ⼈ 'MAN' 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.[10] 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,[11] but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars.[12]

In contrast, associative compound characters are common among kokuji, kanji originally coined in Japan. An example of a modern Chinese-language compound ideograph is 鉑; 'platinum', combining the ⾦ 'GOLD' and ⽩ 'WHITE' radicals. (However, this character can also be interpreted as a phono-semantic compound akin to most chemical element names in Chinese, as discussed below.)

A pivotal step in the development of Chinese writing was the application of the rebus principle, or borrowing, in which an existing character was used to represent an unrelated word with similar or identical pronunciation. The rebus device represented the stage at which logographic writing could acquire a deeper phonetic dimension. Chinese characters used purely for their sound values are attested in manuscripts from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, with swapping back and forth between different characters to write the same word sometimes occurring within the span of a handful of lines; for example, 氏; zhī is used to write 是; shì and vice versa, and likewise with 勺; sháo for 趙; zhào. These characters were either homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time of writing.[13]

Sometimes the old meaning of a borrowed character was subsequently lost completely, as with characters such as 自; zì, which has lost its original meaning of 'nose' completely, and now exclusively has the meaning of 'oneself', or 萬; wàn, which originally meant 'scorpion' but is now used only to mean the number 'ten thousand'.

When transcribing words of foreign origin, such as with contemporary non-Chinese names, as well as with the Buddhist terminology borrowed in antiquity, Chinese characters are used for their phonetic value, in a rebus-like fashion. For example, in the name 罗马尼亚; 羅馬尼亞; Luómǎníyà; 'Romania', each character is only used for its sound value, and does not provide any particular meaning.[14] This usage is similar to that of Japanese katakana and hiragana, although these syllabaries use a special set of simplified forms derived from Chinese characters, in order to clarify their purely phonetic role. Use of the rebus principle has also been observed in the writing of names with both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya glyphs.[15] However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total: when transcribing into Chinese, phonetic characters are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This is regularly done with corporate brand names: for example, Coca-Cola's Chinese name is 可口可乐; 可口可樂; Kěkǒu Kělè; 'the mouth can be happy', with the phonetically matching characters selected as to also have a plausible translation as 'delicious and enjoyable'.[14][15]

Structural templates used in compounds, with red marking possible positions for radicals

Also known as semantic-phonetic compounds or picto-phonetic compounds, these characters are composed of at least two parts: the semantic component that suggests the general meaning of the compound, and the phonetic component that gives a hint as to the compound's pronunciation. Phono-semantic compounds are by far the largest class of characters within the traditional six-fold schema. In most cases, the semantic component is also the radical under which the character is categorised in dictionaries. Variously, the phonetic component of a compounds may be selected as to contribute an additional layer of meaning to the compound: as a result, determining whether a given character is a phono-semantic compound or a purely ideographic compound is often non-trivial.

Examples of phono-semantic compounds include 河; hé; 'river', 湖; hú; 'lake', 流; liú; 'stream', 沖; chōng; 'surge', and 滑; huá; 'slippery'. All of these characters have 氵 on the left, three short strokes which constitute a reduced form of the character 水; 'water', and indicate that each character has some meaning related to water. The right-hand side of each character is the phonetic indicator, with 湖; hú having an identical Standard Chinese pronunciation to 胡; hú, and 河; hé; 'river' pronounced similarly to 可; kě. In the case of 沖; chōng; 'surge', the phonetic indicator is 中; zhōng, which by itself means 'middle'. Baxter's reconstructions of Old Chinese provide the historical pronunciations as /*ɡ-ljuŋ/[16] and /*k-ljuŋ/[17] respectively. In these cases the discrepancy is somewhat tame; however, the historical sound changes can have the effect of making the composition of characters seem totally arbitrary today.

In general, phonetic components do not provide the pronunciation of a character exactly, but only a clue as to its pronunciation. While some characters do take the exact pronunciation of their phonetic component, others may only share the initial or final sounds.[18] In fact, some characters' pronunciations may not seem to correspond to the pronunciations of their phonetic parts at all, which is sometimes the case with characters that have undergone simplification. The 8 characters in the following table all take 也 for their phonetic part—however, it is apparent that none of them share 也's modern pronunciation. The character's Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed by Baxter–Sagart (2014) as /*lAjʔ/.[19] The table below shows some of the sound changes that have taken place since the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the time of most of these characters' original creation. The phonetic drift can be dramatic, sometimes to the point of no longer providing a modern reader any hint whatsoever as to the pronunciation.

Xu Shen placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while the figure from the 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary is closer to 90%, due to the extreme proficiency of this technique in extending the Chinese vocabulary. The chữ Nôm characters of Vietnam were also created using this principle.

This method is used to form new characters: for example 钚; 鈈; bù; 'plutonium' is the 'metal' radical 金 plus the phonetic 不; bù, described in Chinese as "不 gives sound, 金 gives meaning". Many Chinese names for chemical elements and other characters related to chemistry were formed in this way. In fact, it is possible to tell just by glancing at a Chinese periodic table which elements are metals (金), solid non-metals (石; 'stone'), liquids (氵), or gases (气; 'breath') at standard temperature and pressure.

Occasionally a disyllabic word is written with two characters that contain the same radical, as in 蝴蝶; 'butterfly', where both characters have the 'insect' radical 虫. A notable example regards the pipa, a type of lute. Its name was originally shared with a fruit with a shape reminiscent of the instrument, known in English as the loquat. The name of the instrument was originally written with the 'hand' radical 扌 as 批把, referring to the upward and downward strokes made when playing the instrument. The name for the fruit later changed to 枇杷 (with 'tree' radical 木), which is the name still in use, while the name for the instrument was changed to 琵琶, with radical 玨. In other cases, a compound word may coincidentally share a radical between its characters, without it being meaningful.

The smallest category of characters is also the least understood.[20] In the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen gave the example pair of 考; kǎo; 'to verify' and 老; lǎo; 'old', which have similar OC pronunciations of /*khuʔ/ and /*C-ruʔ/ respectively,[21][lower-greek 7] and may once have been the same word, meaning 'elderly person', and later lexicalising into two separate words. The term does not appear in the actual body of the dictionary, and is often omitted from modern systems.[22]

The traditional Shuowen Jiezi schema presupposes either a phonetic or semantic purpose for every character component.[23] More recently, with the lens of modern semiotics, many components have been identified that effectively serve neither role, and have become pure signs, or "pure form" components. From a structural point of view, a seven-category system naturally emerges, with:[24][25]

1. Semantic characters made of only semantic components,
2. Phonetic characters made of only phonetic components,
3. Pure form characters made of only pure form components,
4. Semantic–phonetic characters, also called "phono-semantic characters", made of both semantic and phonetic components,
5. Semantic–form characters made of semantic and pure form components,
6. Phonetic–form characters made of phonetic and pure form components, and
7. Semantic–phonetic–form characters with all three component types.

According to Yang, [26] of the 3,500 frequently used characters in contemporary Standard Chinese, semantic characters are the rarest, accounting for about 5%, followed by pure form characters with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form together accounting for 19%, with the remaining 58% being semantic–phonetic characters—loosely analogous to the traditional category of phono-semantic compounds.

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters

Words in Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic; as such, each character denoted an independent word.[31] Affixes could be added to form a new word, which was often written with the same single character. In many cases, the pronunciations then diverged due to the systematic sound changes caused by the affixes. For example, many additional readings in modern varieties reflect the Middle Chinese 'departing tone', the major source of the 4th tone in modern Standard Chinese. Many scholars now believe that this Middle Chinese tone is the reflex of an Old Chinese derivational suffix /*-s/ called the qusheng that served a range of semantic functions—possibly the only example of inflectional morphology extant in the otherwise analytic language.[32][33] For example:

Another common sound change occurred between voiced and voiceless initials, though the phonemic voicing distinction has disappeared in most modern varieties. This is believed to reflect an Old Chinese de-transitivising prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form reflects the original root. Note how the pairs of readings below reflect opposite transitivity from one another.

Multi-syllable words began entering the language during the Western Zhou period; it is estimated that between 25% and 30% of the vocabulary used in Warring States period texts is polysyllabic. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones.[39] The most common process of Chinese word formation after the Classical period has been to create compounds of existing words. Words have also been created by appending affixes to words, by reduplicating words, and by borrowing words from other languages.[40] While polysyllabic words are generally written with one character per syllable, abbreviations are occasionally used.[41]

Many compound words are composed from two near-synonymous characters words, creating a new, less ambiguous form that is often used in variation with one of its component characters, depending on context. For example:

Equally as common are nouns composed from a root and a particle suffix possessing no particular meaning, such as 子; zǐ. These constructions serve to create a disyllabic word with the same meaning as the root character. As above, the root word usually, though not always, remains independent, in variation with the compound word.

Morphemic characters that have fallen out of use as independent words, and are now used only in compounds, are called bound forms.

Large-scale surveys by the PRC's Ministry of Education and State Language Commission have shown strong distribution patterns in the use of characters and words. This form of analysis is essential to the quantitative research of the Chinese language, with applications in pedagogy, publishing, and information processing.[42]

The number of characters used in modern Chinese is stable, hovering around 10,000 in recent decades. Contrastingly, 80% of Chinese-language text is composed of just 590 characters, with 90% coverage achieved with 960 characters, and 99% with 2,400.[43]

Several works of classical Chinese literature indicate that, prior to the invention of characters, knotted cords were used to keep records.[44][45] The practice had some similarities to the Inca technique of quipu.[46] Works that reference the practice include chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching[47] and "Xici II" of the Yijing.[48]

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 3rd millennium BCE. Frustrated by the limitations of knotting, and 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 字; zì—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.[49]

In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Neolithic sites in China, including Jiahu (c. 6500 BCE), Dadiwan and Damaidi from the 6th millennium BCE, and Banpo (5th millennium BCE). Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years.[50][51] However, because these marks occur singly without any implied context and are made crudely, 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."[52] They do however demonstrate a history of sign use in the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period.[51]

Ox scapula with oracle bone inscription

The earliest confirmed evidence of Chinese script is the body of inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE).[53][54] The earliest of these is dated to c. 1200 BCE.[55][56] 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, which was excavated by the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.[53]

Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits.[53] The inscriptions range in length from a few characters at the shortest, to 30–40 characters at the longest. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors by means of scapulimancy, inquiring about subjects such as the royal family, military success, and weather forecasting. The interpreted answers would be recorded on the divination material itself.[53]

Oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system,[57][58] suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the late second millennium BCE.[59] 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 on wood and bamboo—were less durable than bones and shells, and have since decayed away.[59]

The Zhou-era Shi Qiang pan, a bronze ritual basin dated c. 900 BCE. Long inscriptions on the surface describe the deeds and virtues of the first seven Zhou kings

The traditional notion of an orderly procession of scripts, with each suddenly invented and displacing the one previous, has been conclusively superseded by modern archaeological finds and scholarly research.[60] More often, it was the case that two or more scripts coexisted in a given area, and that scripts evolved gradually. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script in bamboo books—preserved in bronze inscriptions—as well as the elaborate pictorial forms, often clan emblems, found on many bronzes.

Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is clear that the mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion from the Shang to the Zhou dynasty, until assuming the form that is now known as small seal script in the state of Qin, without any sudden shifts.[61][62] Meanwhile, other scripts had evolved during the late Zhou, especially in eastern and southern regions. These include decorative scripts such as the bird-worm seal script, and the regional 'ancient' forms of eastern warring states, preserved as variant forms in the Han-era Shuowen Jiezi.

Small seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qin during the Eastern Zhou, became standardised as the character forms used throughout all of China by the imperial Qin dynasty. However, more than one script was in use at the time: a little-known, rectilinear, 'vulgar' form of the characters had coexisted alongside the more formal seal script for centuries in the Qin state; the popularity of this vulgar form grew as the practice of writing itself became more widespread.[63] An immature form of clerical script called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical" had already developed by the Warring States period in the state of Qin[64] based upon this vulgar form, with influence from seal script as well.[65] The coexistence of the three scripts—small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually into clerical script—runs counter to the traditional belief that the Qin dynasty only used one script, and that the clerical script was suddenly invented during the early Han.

The proto-clerical script matured gradually, and by the early Han period its sophistication was comparable to small seal script.[66] Recently discovered bamboo slips show the emergence of mature clerical script by the end of Emperor Wu of Han's reign in 141–87 BCE.[67]

Like previous eras, there were multiple scripts in use during the Han,[68] although mature clerical script, also called 八分; bāfēn script,[69] was dominant. An early type of cursive script was also in use by the Han at least as early as 24 BCE;[lower-alpha 6] it incorporated popular cursive forms of the time, as well as elements from the vulgar writing of Qin.[70] By the time of the Jin dynasty, this Han cursive became known as 章草; zhāngcǎo, known sometimes in English as 'clerical cursive', 'ancient cursive', or 'draft cursive'. Some believe the name, using the character 章; zhāng; 'orderly', arose because the style was a more orderly form[71] of cursive than the modern form, called 今草; jīncǎo; 'modern cursive',[72] which emerged during the Jin and is still in use today,

Around the middle of the Eastern Han,[71] a simplified and easier form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms 新隶体; 新隸體; xīnlìtǐ; 'neo-clerical'.[73] This had become the dominant daily script by the late Han, [71] although clerical script remained in use for formal works such as engraved stelae.[71] Qiu describes this neo-clerical script as a transitional form between clerical and regular script,[71] and it remained in use through the Cao Wei and Jin dynasties.[74]

By the late Han, an early form of semi-cursive script[73] had begun developing from a cursive form of neo-clerical script.[lower-alpha 7][75] This semi-cursive script was traditionally attributed to Liu Desheng (c. 147 – 188 CE),[74][lower-alpha 8] 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 solely Liu's invention.[76]

A page from a Song dynasty publication in a regular script typeface, which resembles the handwriting of Tang-era calligrapher Ouyang Xun

The design of regular script has been credited to Cao Wei calligrapher Zhong Yao (c. 151 – 230), often called the "father of regular script". However, some scholars[77] observe that one person could not have unilaterally developed a new script which went on to see universally adoption, but could only have been a crucial contributor to the style's gradual formation. The earliest surviving manuscripts written in regular script are copies of Zhong Yao's work, including at least one copied by the "Sage of Calligraphy" Wang Xizhi. Regular script developed out of a neatly written form of early semi-cursive, with addition of the 顿; 頓; dùn; 'pause' technique to end horizontal strokes, plus heavy tails on strokes which are written the downward-right diagonal.[78] 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 matured further during the Eastern Jin dynasty in the hands of Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi. However, it had not yet achieved widespread use, with most writers continuing to use the earlier neo-clerical and semi-cursive styles for daily writing,[78] with the conservative clerical script also remaining in use on some stelae.[79]

Meanwhile, modern cursive script slowly emerged during this period, under the influence of both semi-cursive and the newly emerged regular script.[80] In the hands of a few master calligraphers such as Wang, modern cursive began to be formalised.[lower-alpha 9]

It was not until the Northern and Southern dynasties that regular script rose to dominant status.[81] During that period, regular script continued evolving stylistically, reaching full maturity in the early Tang dynasty. Some call the writing of Ouyang Xun the first examples of 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.

Han unification is an ongoing effort by the Unicode Consortium to map each of the multiple character sets used within Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—together called the 'CJK languages'—into a single set of unified characters equally usable each language. The first release of the Unicode standard in 1991 was a major milestone of Han unification, and most text on the internet written in the relevant languages is now encoded with so-called CJK ideographs.

In the Japanese writing system, Chinese characters used are known as kanji. Japanese historically borrowed many words from Chinese, which were written with their original characters, while native Japanese words were also written with orthographic borrowings of Chinese characters with similar meanings. Most kanji arrived via both borrowing processes, and thus have both native Japanese readings, known as kun'yomi, as well as Chinese-original readings, known as on'yomi. Moreover, Chinese words were often borrowed multiple times from different varieties and at different times, resulting in several distinct on'yomi readings for the same character.[87] Modern Japanese uses kanji for most word stems, as well as a pair of syllabaries—hiragana and katakana, together known as kana. Hiragana are used to write words, including Japanese's grammatical inflections and particles, and katakana are used for transcribing non-Chinese loanwords, as well as for emphasis of native words, similar to how italics are used in languages written with the Latin script.[88] The syllabaries were derived by simplifying Chinese characters selected to represent Japanese syllables; they differ from one another in part because each selected different characters for certain syllables, in addition to the different strategies employed to reduce the characters for easy writing. The angular katakana were obtained by selecting a smaller component from each character, while the curving hiragana were based on the cursive form of the entire character.[89]

Because Japanese, unlike Chinese, is a synthetic language, many words consist of multiple syllables, and as such many kanji have multi-syllable pronunciations. For example, the kanji 刀 has a native kun'yomi reading of katana. In different contexts, it can also be read with the on'yomi reading tō, such as in the Chinese loanword 日本刀, nihontō, 'Japanese sword', whose pronunciation descends from the Chinese pronunciation at the time of borrowing. (In contemporary Standard Chinese, the word is pronounced rìběndào.) While modern loanwords from languages outside of the Sinosphere are usually written with katakana, loanwords prior to the Meiji era were typically written with unrelated kanji whose on'yomi had the same pronunciation as the syllables in the loanword. These spellings are called called ateji: for example, 亜米利加 was written for modern アメリカ, Amerika, 'America', 歌留多 or 加留多 for modern カルタ, karuta, 'card', 'letter', and 天婦羅 or 天麩羅 for modern テンプラ, tenpura, 'tempura'. Only some ateji spellings are still in common use, such as 缶, kan, 'can'.

As early as the Gojoseon period, Classical Chinese was the dominant form of written communication in Korea. Although the hangul alphabet was invented by the Joseon king Sejong in 1443, it was not taken up by Korean literati, and did not come into widespread use until the late 19th century.[90][91] Even today, much of the Korean vocabulary, especially in areas of science and sociology, comes directly from Chinese. However, due to the lack of tones in the Korean language, many dissimilar Sino-Korean words took on identical pronunciations, and as such are spelled identically in hangul. For example, the phonetic dictionary 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 to write hanja, students are taught to memorise both native and Sino-Korean Korean pronunciations for each hanja. The collation of hanja is similar to if the word water were listed as 'water; aqua', 'horse; equus', or 'gold; aurum', as hybridisations of the English and Latin terms.[92] Examples of listings include:

Hanja are still used in South Korea, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names, and the practice of calligraphy—although to nowhere near the extent of kanji use in Japanese society. Contemperaneously, Chinese characters are sometimes used for disambiguation of homophones. Additionally, their use still possesses connotations of learnedness and cultural Confucianism; knowledge of Chinese characters is considered to be a high class attribute by many Koreans, and an indispensable part of a classical education.[91] There is a clear trend toward the exclusive use of hangul in ordinary South Korean contexts.[93] Its use has become a politically contentious issue in the country, with some urging a "purification" of the national language and culture by totally abandoning their use and ending hanja education in schools, and instead exclusively using hangul throughout society and the in public schools. Others support a revival of ordinary hanja use, such as was the case in the 1970s and 80s.[94]

Hanja educational policy has swung back and forth within the country, often swayed by the inclinations of individual education ministers. Students in grades 7–12 are presently taught 1,800 characters,[94] albeit with a principal focus on simple recognition, with the aim of achieving newspaper literacy.[91] Hanja retains its prominence in Korean academia, as the vast majority of Korean documents, history, and literature (such as the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty) were written in Classical Chinese using hanja. Therefore, a working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone wishing to interpret and study older Korean texts, or anyone who wishes to read scholarship in the humanities. Working knowledge of hanja is also useful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean vocabulary.[95]

In North Korea, the hanja system was completely banned since June 1949 as part of a ban on all so-called foreign languages, including 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.[96]

Upon the accession of Kim Jong Un in 2011, the North Korean government began mandating the use of hanja as a source of definition for the Korean language. Currently, North Korea is estimated to teach around 3,000 hanja to North Korean students; 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.[97] Due to the country's isolation, accurate reports about hanja use in North Korea are hard to obtain.

Chinese characters are thought to have been first introduced to the Ryukyu Islands in 1265 by a Japanese Buddhist monk.[98] 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 labelled as a dialect of Japanese by the Japanese government, katakana and hiragana are mostly used to write Okinawan, but Chinese characters are still used.

The first two lines of the classic Vietnamese epic poem The Tale of Kiều, written in both chữ Nôm and the Vietnamese alphabet

  Borrowed characters representing Sino-Vietnamese words

  Borrowed characters representing native Vietnamese words

  Invented chữ Nôm characters representing native Vietnamese words

Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese (Hán văn) was used in Vietnam for all official and scholarly writing. Chinese characters, called chữ Hán (𡨸漢), chữ Nho (𡨸儒), or Hán tự (漢字), are now limited to ceremonial use in Vietnam.

The oldest written Chinese text found in Vietnam is an epigraphy dated to the year 618, erected by local Sui officials in Thanh Hóa.[99] Around the 13th century, a script called chữ Nôm (𡨸喃) was developed to record folk literature in the Vietnamese language. Similar to Zhuang sawndip, some chữ Nôm characters were created by combining semantic character components with phonetic components that resembled Vietnamese syllables.[100] This process resulted in a highly complex system whose use was limited to a small portion of the Vietnamese population, never more than 5%.[101] The oldest chữ Nôm written alongside Chinese is a Buddhist inscription, dated 1209.[100] Before 1945, the library of the French School of the Far East (EFEO) in Hanoi collected a total of around 20,000 Chinese and Vietnamese epigraphy rubbings from throughout Indochina.[102] The oldest surviving extant manuscript in Vietnam is a late 15th-century bilingual copy of the Buddhist Sutra of Filial Piety, currently kept by the EFEO. It features Chinese text in larger characters, and an Old Vietnamese translation in smaller characters glossing the text.[103] Every Hán–Nôm book in Vietnam after the Phật thuyết is dated between the 17th and the 20th centuries, with most being hand-copied works, and few printed texts. By 1987, the library of the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi had collected a total of 4,808 Hán-Nôm manuscripts.[104]

A page from a bilingual copy of the Sutra of Filial Piety, with Classical Chinese alongside an early form of chữ Nôm, representing the Old Vietnamese pronunciation. Sometimes, pairs of characters are used to represent the consonant clusters present in Old Vietnamese

During the French colonial period, Classical Chinese fell out of use, and chữ Nôm were gradually replaced with the Vietnamese alphabet, which uses Latin characters and remains the primary writing system for Vietnamese.[105][106] Chinese characters and chữ Nôm are still used in some activities connected with Vietnamese traditional culture, such as calligraphy.

Vietnamese imperial edict in Classical Chinese

Several minority languages of South and Southwest China were formerly written with scripts based on Chinese characters, but also included many locally created characters. The most extensive is the sawndip script used to write the Zhuang languages of Guangxi, which is still in use despite efforts to encourage the writing of Zhuang with a Latin-based alphabet. Other languages written with such scripts include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Mulam, Kam, Bai, and Hani.[107] All these languages are now officially written using Latin-based scripts, while Chinese characters are still used for the Mulam language. Even today for Zhuang, according to survey, the traditional sawndip script has twice as many users as the official Latin script.[108]

The foreign dynasties that ruled northern China between the 10th and 13th centuries developed scripts that were inspired by Chinese characters but did not use them directly: the Khitan large script, Khitan small script, Tangut script, and Jurchen script—though Chinese characters were used to phonetically transcribe the language of the Jurchen people, both renamed 'Manchu' after the founding of the Qing dynasty. Other scripts within China that have adapted a few Chinese characters but are otherwise distinct include the Geba script, Sui script, Yi script, and the Lisu syllabary.[107]

Excerpt from the Secret History of the Mongols featuring Chinese characters used to write Mongolian, with glosses to the right of each row

Along with the Persian and Arabic scripts, the Mongolian language was also written with Chinese characters phonetically transcribing Mongolian sounds. Notably, the only surviving copies of The Secret History of the Mongols were written in such a manner.

According to the 19th century missionary 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."[109]

Chinese calligraphy of mixed styles by Song poet Mi Fu

Chinese calligraphy is usually done with ink brush, and was considered one of the Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar. The set of rules is deliberately minimalist, but each character has a set number of brushstrokes. Strict regularity is not required, since strokes may be accentuated for dramatic effect of individual style. Calligraphy was the means by which scholars could artfully express their thoughts and teachings.

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

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.

'Song' typefaces (宋体; 宋體; sòngtǐ)—also called 'Ming' in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—are named for the Song and Ming dynasties, considered to be periods during which block printing flourished in China, and whose printed styles are being imitated by the typefaces.

Sans-serif typefaces, called 黑体; 黑體; hēitǐ; 'black form' in Chinese and ゴシック体, 'Gothic' in Japanese, are characterised by simple lines of even thickness for each stroke, akin to sans-serif styles in Western typography.

Regular script typefaces are also common, 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 calligrapher's handwriting, while most modern regular script typefaces tend toward general-purpose use.

The typeface family Noto Serif CJK's regional forms for the character 次 in Chinese Simplified and Traditional as used in both Taiwan and Hong Kong (top), as well as Japanese and Korean (bottom)

With the use of the printing press, there was a considerable level of consolidation in forms prior to the standardization efforts of the 20th century, especially during the Ming. These orthodox Ming forms are in turn perennially represented in the touchstone references for written Chinese in the modern era, such as the 1716 Kangxi dictionary and the 1915 Zhonghua Da Zidian.

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 Xinhai Revolution and its associated May Fourth Movement, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China as quickly as possible. Traditional culture and values were challenged and subsequently blamed for societal and economic problems. Soon, people in the movement began pointing to the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle to the modernisation of China, proposing that it should either be reformed or abolished entirely. Lu Xun, a renowned 20th century author, stated 'If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die'.[111]

The first standardised list of simplified forms, introduced in 1935 and consisting of 324 characters

During 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.[112] In 1935, a table of 324 simplified characters collected by Qian Xuantong was introduced as the first official batch of simplified characters; however, it was rescinded in 1936 due to fierce opposition within the party.

Stroke order animations for the Simplified and Traditional forms 們; 们,[lower-alpha 11] demonstrating systematic simplification of radicals within a character

Although most closely associated with the PRC, the modern process of character simplification began well before 1949. Cursive forms inspired many of the simplified characters, while others were already used in print, albeit not for most formal works. With the goal of increasing functional literacy, a major concern at the time, discussions on character simplification took place among Chinese intelligentsia and within the Kuomintang government during the Republican period. This earlier initiative to simplify the Chinese writing system was later inherited and implemented by the Communists after its subsequent abandonment by the KMT.

The use of traditional versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium. Before the official reforms, character simplifications were not officially sanctioned and generally took the form of vulgar variants and idiosyncratic substitutions. Orthodox forms were mandatory in printed works, while unofficial simplified forms would be used in everyday writing or quick notes. Since the 1950s, the PRC has officially encouraged the use of simplified characters on the mainland. Hong Kong and Macau, still under colonial rule at the time, as well as the Republic of China were not affected by this reform. There is no firm rule for which characters to use, and often it is determined by tastes and inclinations of the audience and writer.

In other Sinophone countries, the use of simplified characters is generally more common among younger people, while many older Chinese speakers generation still use traditional forms. Outside of China, Chinese-language shop signs are also often written using traditional characters.

Most simplified forms in use today are the direct result of PRC initiatives during the 1950s and 60s. During the transitional years, while considerable confusion about the character forms was still rampant, transitional characters mixing simplified and yet-to-be simplified components appeared sporadically, then disappeared. Before largely settling on simplifying the existing system, some within the PRC, including Mao Zedong, also explored the total replacement of Chinese characters with a phonetic script, usually based on the Latin alphabet, leading to projects such as Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Latinxua Sin Wenz.

The PRC initiated the first round of simplifications with two documents published in 1956 and 1965. The majority of first round characters were drawn from conventional abbreviated or ancient forms.[113] For example, the orthodox character 來 was written as 来 in the earlier clerical script; it used one fewer stroke, and was thus adopted as a simplified form. The 雲; 'cloud' character was written as 云 in the ancient oracle bone script. This simpler form had remained in use later as a phonetic loan with a meaning of 'to say', and with the original meaning of 'cloud' it was instead written with an added 雨; 'rain' radical as a semantic indicator. When using simplified forms, these two characters are merged into 云.

A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, but it was poorly received by the public, and fell out of official use very quickly, ultimately being formally rescinded in 1986. The second round of simplifications were unpopular in large part because the vast majority of its forms were completely new, in stark contrast to the many familiar variants present in the first round.

Two revised lists of simplified characters were published in 1988: the List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese having 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less common characters, and the Chart of Generally Utilised Characters of Modern Chinese with 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. In 2013, the revised Table of General Standard Chinese Characters replaced the 1988 lists as the new standard. The 2013 standard includes 8,105 characters, with 3,500 categorised as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and 1,605 as tertiary. GB 2312, an early version of the national encoding standard used in the PRC, has 6,763 code points. GB 18030, the modern, mandatory standard, has a much higher number. The Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) covers 2,663 characters and 5,000 words at its highest level, while the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education would cover 3,000 characters and 11,092 words at the highest level.[114][115][116]

Singapore underwent three successive rounds of character simplification promulgated by the Ministry of Education, with the first two having some simplifications that differed from those used in mainland China. The first round was published in 1969, and consisted of 498 simplified and 502 traditional characters. The second round in 1974 consisted of 2287 simplified characters, including 49 differences from the PRC system that were removed with the final round in 1976. In 1993, Singapore adopted the 1986 revisions made in mainland China.

Unlike in mainland China, where personal names may only be registered using simplified characters, Singapore parents have the option of registering their children's names in traditional characters.[117]

In 1981, Malaysia began using a set of simplified characters in schools, completely identical to those used on the mainland. Chinese-language newspapers in the country are published using either set of characters—often with headlines in traditional characters with the body in simplified characters.

In the Philippines, most Chinese schools and businesses still use the traditional characters with 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.

In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education's Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters lists 4,808 characters; the 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 96,000 characters),[118] while the most widely used non-Unicode encoding scheme, BIG-5, supports only 13,053. The Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL) covers 8,000 words at its highest level. The Taiwan Benchmarks for the Chinese Language (TBCL), a guideline developed to describe levels of Chinese language proficiency, covers 3,100 characters and 14,425 words at its highest level (level seven).[119][120]

In Hong Kong, which uses traditional characters, the Education and Manpower Bureau's List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters, containing 4,759 characters, is intended for use in elementary and junior secondary education.

Chinese-language signage in the United States and Canada most often uses traditional characters.[121] There is some effort to get municipal governments to implement more simplified character signage due to recent immigration from mainland China.[122] Most Chinese-language newspapers in North America are printed using traditional characters.

After World War II, the Japanese government also instituted a series of orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms called shinjitai; the older forms were then labelled the kyūjitai. 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 list in 1945, the 1945-character jōyō kanji 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 common guidelines, hence many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, especially those used for personal and place names, as well as for some common words such as 竜、龍, 'dragon' in which both old and new forms of the character are both acceptable and widely known amongst native Japanese speakers.

The following is a comparison of Chinese characters in the Standard Form of National Characters, Taiwan's standard of traditional characters, the PRC's Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for simplified characters, and the jōyō kanji. Generally, jōyō kanji are more similar to traditional characters than simplified characters are. 'Simplified' is often used more generally to refer to any variant from the Taiwan standard characters, and not necessarily a newly created character or a newly performed substitution.

In certain cases, compound words and set phrases may be represented by single-character contractions. Some of these can be considered logograms, where characters represent whole words rather than syllable-morphemes, though these are generally considered as non-standard ligatures or abbreviations instead—similar to scribal abbreviations such as an ampersand for the digraph et, or an ñ for the digraph nn. These usually see use in handwriting or decorations, but sometimes in print as well. These ligatures are called 合文; héwén, 合书; 合書; héshū or 合体字; 合體字; hétǐzì in Chinese; in the special case where two characters are combined, they are known as 双音节汉字; 雙音節漢字; shuāng-yīnjié hànzì; 'two-syllable characters'.

A commonly seen example is the 'double happiness' character 囍, formed as a ligature of 喜喜 and referred to by its disyllabic name 双喜; 雙喜; 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 in Standard Mandarin,[125][5] though other Chinese varieties may differ. For example, 廿 is given a monosyllabic reading of jaa⁶ in Cantonese.[126] Calendars often use numeral ligatures in order to save space, and in modern printings of the traditional Chinese calendar, the use of 廿 is standard. Thus, one would generally write "21 March" as 三月廿一.

Modern examples particularly include Chinese characters for SI units. In Chinese these units are disyllabic and usually written with two characters, as with 厘米; límǐ; 'centimetre' from 厘; 'centi-' and 米; 'metre', 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 图; 圕, a contraction of 图书馆; 圖書館; túshūguǎn; 'library'.[127][128] Since polysyllabic characters are often non-standard, they are often excluded from character dictionaries.

The use of such contractions is as old as the characters themselves, and they have frequently been used in religious or ritual contexts. In the oracle bone script, personal names, ritual items, and even phrases are commonly contracted into single characters, such as 受又; shòu yòu; 'receive blessings' becoming 祐; yòu. A dramatic example is found in medieval manuscripts, where 菩萨; 菩薩; púsà; 'bodhisattva' is sometimes contracted to a single character composed of four 十 arranged in a 2×2 grid—derived from the 'grass' radicals 艹 in the original characters.[5] For the sake of consistency and standardisation, the Chinese government has sought to limit the contemporary use of polysyllabic characters in public writing.[5]

Conversely, with the erhua phenomenon in Mandarin varieties, expressed via the fusion of the diminutive 儿; ér suffix, some monosyllabic words may be written with two characters, such as in 花儿; huār; 'flower'.

Chinese characters are primarily morphosyllabic, meaning that there is usually a one-to-one correspondence between Chinese morphemes and spoken Chinese syllables, and therefore written Chinese characters. However, in modern Chinese varieties most common words are disyllabic and therefore dimorphemic. In modern Standard Chinese, 10% of morphemes are bound forms, only appearing in compound words. However, a few morphemes are disyllabic, some of which even date back to Classical Chinese.[129] Excluding loanwords, these are typically words for plants and small animals, usually written with a pair of phono-semantic compounds sharing a common radical. Examples are 蝴蝶; húdié; 'butterfly' and 珊瑚; shānhú; 'coral'. Note that the first character of 'butterfly' and the second character of 'coral' both have 胡 as their phonetic component, and the 'insect' and 'jade' radicals for their respective semantic components—also present within the other character in their respective words. Neither of the aforementioned hú characters exist as independent morphemes, except as poetic abbreviations of the disyllabic words.

Often a rare character, complex, or antiquate variant will appear in personal or place names. As many computer encoding systems have historically included only the most common characters, this can create problems.

An example of potential difficulties are those encountered by Taiwanese politician Yu Shyi-kun 游錫堃, whose name contains the rare character 堃; kūn. Newspapers have dealt with this problem in various ways, including the use of software to combine two existing, similar characters, embedding a picture of the character instead of encoding it as text, substituting a homophonic character in the hope that the reader would be able to make the correct inference, as often was the case with Yu Shyi-kun. Printed materials in Taiwan will often add bopomofo next to such a character. Japanese newspapers may render them in katakana instead, as is accepted practice for people writing characters in general for which they are unsure of the correct kanji.

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; zhé; 'verbose'^ⓘ, 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 16-stroke 龍; lóng; 'dragon' four times in the space allotted for one. Another 64-stroke character is 𠔻; zhèng, similarly composed of four 興; xīng, xìng; 'flourish'.

One of the most complex characters found in modern Chinese dictionaries is 齉; nàng; 'snuffle (onomatopoeia)'^ⓘ with 36 strokes.[lower-alpha 12] 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 龍 in triplicate, for a total of 16 × 3 = 48 strokes. Among the most complex characters in frequent modern use are 籲; yù; 'to implore' with 32 strokes, 鬱; yù; 'luxuriant', 'lush', 'gloomy' with 29 strokes, 豔; yàn; 'colourful' with 28 strokes, and 釁; xìn; 'quarrel' with 25 strokes. Also in occasional modern use is 鱻; xiān; 'fresh', a variant of 鮮, with 33 strokes.

In Japanese, an 84-stroke kokuji exists: , normally read taito. It is composed of the 'cloud' character 䨺 atop the abovementioned triple-'dragon' character 龘, also having the meaning of 'the appearance of a dragon in flight', it has been pronounced おとど, otodo, たいと, taito, and だいと, daito.[130] The most elaborate character in the jōyō kanji list is the 29-stroke 鬱, meaning 'depression' or 'melancholy'.

• 
  Zhé, 'verbose'
• 
  Zhèng, meaning unknown
• 
  Nàng, 'poor enunciation due to snuffling'
• 
  Taito, 'the appearance of a dragon in flight'
• 
  Alternative form of taito
• 
  Biáng, a kind of noodle from Shaanxi

Cumulative frequency of simplified Chinese characters in Modern Chinese text[150]

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

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 of between 5,000 and 6,000 characters.[151]

In addition, there are a number of 'dialect characters' that are not generally used in formal written Chinese but represent colloquial terms in non-standard varieties of Chinese. In general, it is common practice to use standard characters to transcribe Chinese dialects when obvious cognates with Standard Mandarin words 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 phono-semantic compounds, e.g. Min Nan 侬; 'person', although a few are compound ideographs, e.g. northeast Mandarin 孬; 'bad'. 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. the etymological 觸祭 versus the phonetic 戳鸡 in Shanghainese, meaning 'eat'. Speakers of a dialect will generally recognise a dialectal word if it is transcribed according to phonetic considerations, while the etymologically correct form may be more difficult or impossible to recognise. For example, few Gan speakers would recognise the character 隑 meaning 'to lean' in their dialect, because this character is now archaic in Standard Mandarin. The historically "correct" transcription is often so obscure that it is only uncovered after considerable research in philology and historical phonology, and may be disputed by other researchers.

As an exception, written Cantonese is widespread 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 Hakka vernacular character 㓾, pronounced cii¹¹, means 'to kill'.[152] Other varieties of Chinese with a significant number of speakers—like Shanghainese Wu, Gan Chinese, and Sichuanese Mandarin—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.

Kanji for 剣道, kendo, with equivalent Korean pronunciation kumdo and equivalent Chinese pronunciation jiàndào[lower-alpha 13]

There are 2,136 jōyō kanji as 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.[163]

Character usage is officially restricted 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 is published.[164] It currently contains 983 characters.[165]

Today, a well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3,500 characters.[166] The kanji kentei 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 JIS X 0208 list.[167][168]

The South Korean Basic Hanja for Educational Use are a set of 1,800 characters standardised in 1972, with the first 900 hanja taught to middle school students, and the rest taught to high school students.[169]

In March 1991, the Supreme Court of Korea published the 2,854-character Table of Hanja for Use in Personal Names.[170] The list expanded gradually: by 2015 there were 8,142 hanja, including the set of basic hanja, permitted for use in Korean names.[171]

 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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.