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Chinese Character Wiki

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The Chinese Character Wiki is a community-maintained database of Chinese character information. It powers the character breakdowns and explanations throughout the site.

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 categorises components into eight types:

• the meaning component — contributes to the character's meaning.

• the sound component — contributes to the character's pronunciation.

• the iconic component — a pictographic representation of meaning.

• the remnant component — a vestige of an older, more complex form.

• the simplified component — a simplification of a traditional component.

• the deleted component — a component that was removed during simplification.

• the distinguishing component — added to distinguish similar characters.

• the unknown component — the component's role is unclear.

How to contribute

Anyone can suggest edits to character data. Navigate to a character page and click "Edit". 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