"Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions influenced by Chinese culture. Over more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that directly reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes—the units of meaning in a language—often encoding aspects of pronunciation as well as meaning. Writing all of a language's frequently used vocabulary requires 2000–3000 characters; as of 2024, nearly 100000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard. Characters are composed of strokes written in a fixed order. Historically, methods of writing characters include inscribing stone, bone, or bronze; brushing ink onto silk, bamboo, or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. More recent technologies using Chinese characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. (Full article...)