hanzi

Hanzi are the Chinese characters used to write Chinese and several other East Asian languages that historically borrowed the script. Each character is a logogram, typically representing a morpheme and, in many cases, a syllable. Hanzi are used across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in overseas Chinese communities. While Mandarin is the most common language written with Hanzi, the characters also appear in writing for Cantonese, Hokkien, and other Chinese varieties.

Historically, Hanzi originated in ancient China, with the earliest confirmed characters appearing on oracle bone inscriptions during the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1050 BCE). They evolved through bronze script, seal script, clerical script, and regular script, culminating in the standard forms used today. In the 20th century, some regions adopted character simplification to reduce strokes and complexity, notably Mainland China and Singapore, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau generally retain traditional forms.

Most Hanzi are constructed from smaller components: semantic elements and phonetic elements, often grouped into radicals used for dictionary indexing. A single character may convey meaning on its own or modify the meaning or pronunciation of related characters. Stroke order rules govern how characters are written, aiding legibility and learning.

Digital encoding and input methods have expanded Hanzi use. The Unicode standard includes a large block of CJK (Chinese–Japanese–Korean) ideographs, with common-use characters encoded across multiple blocks. People learn Hanzi through formal schooling, with literacy typically requiring knowledge of several thousand characters; modern input methods include pinyin, zhuyin (bopomofo), and various shape-based systems, as well as handwriting recognition.