The Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters or the Table of Standard Typefaces for Frequently-Used Chinese Characters () is a list of 4,808 commonly used Chinese characters. The standard typefaces were prescribed by Taiwan's

Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...

, and have been adopted in the

textbooks A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textboo ...

for primary and junior high schools in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...

since September 1982.

History

The project to standardize frequently used Chinese characters started in 1973. This work was undertaken by a task force consisting from the Graduate Institute of Chinese of the

National Taiwan Normal University National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU; ), or ''Shīdà'' is an institution of higher education and normal school operating out of three campuses in Taipei, Taiwan. NTNU is the leading research institute in such disciplines as Education and ...

. The Chart was completed in 1978 and published in June 1979. On September 1, 1982, the Ministry of Education promulgated the Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters, which contained 4,808 characters. In December of the same year, it publicized the Chart of Standard Forms of Less-Than-Common National Characters (), which included 6,341 characters. In addition, 18,388 characters in the Chart of Rarely-Used National Characters () and 18,588 characters in the Chart of Variant Characters () were established later. These four charts include a total of 48,125 characters. On August 4, 1986,

Chinese Standard Interchange Code The CNS 11643 character set (Chinese National Standard 11643), also officially known as the Chinese Standard Interchange Code or CSIC ( zh, tr=, t=中文標準交換碼), is officially the standard character set of Taiwan (Republic of China). In ...

(CNS 11643) was announced as a national standard. Its

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

plane order is set based on the frequency of usage. The characters set and

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

of CNS 11643 were established on the basis of the Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters. In the Taiwan Ministry of Education'
Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form
()

Digital Edition A digital edition is an online magazine or online newspaper delivered in electronic form which is formatted identically to the print version. Digital editions are often called digital facsimiles to underline the likeness to the print version. Dig ...

, the Common National Characters are coded as A. The Less-Than-Common Characters are designated to B and changed to 6,329 characters. The Rarely-Used Characters are C, and the number reduce to 18,319 characters. Also, 465 new-added standard characters are labeled as N. In total, there are 29,921 standard characters in this dictionary, others are deemed as variant characters. The number of variant characters in the latest Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form Digital Edition is 74,407.

References

{{reflist, 2

External links

Learning Program for Stroke Order of Frequently Used Chinese Characters

Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters

Chart of Standard Chinese Characters
- an integration of the three Standard Forms Charts Chinese characters Language education in Taiwan