Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include … See more

The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has continued throughout its history. Some loangraphs (假借; jiǎjiè; 'borrowing') are introduced to … See more

Some characters and components are pure signs, whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. 五 ('five') and 八 ('eight'), whose forms do not give visual … See more

The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled c. 100 CE by Xu Shen. It divided characters into six categories (六書; liùshū) according to what he thought was the original method of their creation. The Shuowen Jiezi ultimately popularized the six category model … See more

Pictographs
Most of the oldest characters are pictographs (象形; xiàngxíng), representational pictures of physical objects. Examples … See more

Phono-semantic compounds
Phono-semantic compounds (形声; 形聲; xíngshēng; 'form and sound' or 谐声; 諧聲; xiéshēng; 'sound agreement') represent most of the modern Chinese lexicon. They are created as compounds of at least two components: See more

There are a class of characters formed as ligatures (合文; héwén) of the characters making up multi-syllable words. These are distinct from ideographic compounds, which illustrate the meaning of single morphemes. More broadly, they represent an exception to the … See more