Chinese Character Wiki

Component Types

Chinese characters are composed of components. Each component has a role in the character — it may contribute meaning, sound, or both. The wiki categorizes components into 8 types:

• meaning The component contributes to the character's meaning.
• sound The component contributes to the character's pronunciation.
• iconic The character is a pictographic representation of its meaning.
• remnant A vestige of an older, more complex form.
• simplified A simplification of a traditional component.
• deleted A component that was removed during simplification.
• distinguishing Added to distinguish from a similar character.
• unknown The component's role is unclear.

How to Contribute

Anyone can suggest edits to character data. Navigate to a character page (e.g. 你) and click "Edit this character." Your edit will be reviewed by a wiki editor before being published.

If you have wiki editor permissions, your edits are automatically approved and you can review edits from other contributors.

Data Sources

The wiki aggregates data from multiple sources:

• Unihan — Unicode standard character properties
• CC-CEDICT — Collaborative Chinese-English dictionary
• AnimCJK — Stroke order animations
• MakeMeAHanzi — Character decomposition data
• Shuowen Jiezi — Ancient character etymology
• Baxter-Sagart — Old Chinese pronunciation reconstructions
• Zhengzhang — Historical phonology
• Jun Da corpus — Character frequency in books
• SUBTLEX-CH — Character frequency in film subtitles

Quick Links

• Search characters
• Browse frequency lists
• View recent changes