Chinese characters

Chinese characters^{[lower-alpha 1]} 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. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.

Quick Facts Chinese characters, Script type ...

Chinese characters
"Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms
Script type	Logographic
Time period	c. 13th century BCE – present
Direction	Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left
Languages	Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese (among others)
Related scripts
Parent systems	(Proto-writing) Chinese characters
Child systems	Bopomofo Kana Yi script Khitan small script Nüshu Jurchen script Tangut script
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Hani (500), ​Han (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja)
Unicode
Unicode alias	Han
Unicode range	U+4E00–U+9FFF CJK Unified Ideographs (full list)
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.

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The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally highly pictographic in style, but evolved over time as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including the promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script, which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been the primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, modern states using Chinese characters have standardised their forms: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

After being introduced to other countries in order to write Literary Chinese, characters were eventually adapted to write the local languages spoken throughout the Sinosphere. In Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, hanja, and chữ Hán respectively. Each of these countries borrowed existing characters to write both native vocabulary and loanwords from Chinese, as well as coining new characters for local use. These languages function differently from Chinese, which has contributed to the replacement of characters with alphabets designed to write Korean and Vietnamese, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written with characters.

At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written according to a fixed order. Methods of writing characters have historically included being carved into stone, being inked with a brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using woodblocks and movable type. Modern information technologies have been adapted to use characters, among them input methods and text encodings introduced for use with computers.