The amount of all Chinese Chars.

[Christopher]

Dear Readers,

I just wrote to ask you how many chin. Chars. there are? I am a foreigner studying Chinese. Yesterday, I bought a guoyu cidian and wondered how many chars. there are. How many does it contain?
Does this website have all chinese chars. created in China?


Thanks.



Christopher

[Dylan Sung]

No one quite know how many Chinese characters there are. Guoyu Cidian probably does not contain them all. I have Kangxi Zidian which was finished in 1716 and contains over 47,000 entries. More recently, there have been efforts to allot them to encoding space for representation in computers. If you go to the Unicode site, you can access the vast majority of characters that have come from all over the world, including very obscure Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese created characters.

I take it that guoyu cidian contains simplified characters. Simplified characters have always existed throughout Chinese character history, but the vast majority of modern simplified characters came about in 1958 and 1964. Another scheme was proposed bring in more new simplifications, but they never became used. Modern simplified characters which were defined in the 1964 recommendations total around two and a half thousand, and most derived from simplifying various elements within a character. See my pages

http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/hanzi

which doesn't give you all those chars, but gives you those which make the simplifications.

Those characters which are easily accessible using Unicode can be found in the unicode site.

http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/uni

is helpful if you want the odd char for html purposes.

Dyl.

[Wu]

In the most regard there are over 50000-60000 chinese characeter (approx.) but for modern usage the most you have to learn is about 3000 to 5000.