Chinese character

Chinese characters
"Chinese character" in traditional (left) and simplified form (right)
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	漢字
Simplified Chinese	汉字
Literal meaning	"Han characters"
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin hànzì Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋ ㄗˋ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Hanntzyh Wade–Giles han4-tzu4 Wu Shanghainese Romanization [høz] Gan Romanization hon5-ci5 Hakka Romanization hon55 sii55 Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization hon-jih Jyutping hon3 zi6 Southern Min Hokkien POJ hàn-jī Teochew Peng'im hang3 ri7 Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC háng-cê Middle Chinese Middle Chinese xanCdzɨC
Vietnamese name
Vietnamese	chữ Hán
Chữ Nôm
Zhuang name
Zhuang	倱 Sawgun
Korean name
Hangul	한자
Hanja	漢字
Transcriptions Revised Romanization hanja McCune–Reischauer hancha
Japanese name
Kanji	漢字
Hiragana	かんじ
Transcriptions Revised Hepburn kanji Kunrei-shiki kanzi

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ). They have been adapted to write a number of other languages including: Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja, and Vietnamese in a system known as chữ Nôm. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. In English, they are sometimes called Han characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji); hundreds more are in everyday use (note that the characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many 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; the corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a limited extent in South Korea.