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Chinese characters [a] are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture.Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention.
A character with only one meaning is a monosemous character, and a character with two or more meanings is a polysemous character. According to statistics from the "Chinese Character Information Dictionary", among the 7,785 mainland standard Chinese characters in the dictionary, there are 4,139 monosemous characters and 3,053 polysemous characters.
Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
A Chinese character can alternatively be input by form-based encoding. Most Chinese characters can be divided into a sequence of components in writing order. There are a few hundred basic components, [111] much less than the number of characters. By representing each component with an English letter and putting them in writing order of the ...
The List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters is the current standard list of 8,105 Chinese characters published by the government of the People's Republic of China and promulgated in June 2013. The project began in 2001, originally named the "Table of Standard Chinese Characters." This table integrates the First Batch of Simplified ...
Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as 正體字; 正体字; zhèngtǐzì; 'orthodox characters'. [9] This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and ...
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally ...
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters.Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese ...