The ''List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters'' is the current standard list of 8,105
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...
published by the government of the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
and promulgated in June 2013.
The project began in 2001, originally named the "Table of Standard Chinese Characters". This table integrates the ''First Batch of Simplified Characters'' (1955), the ''Complete List of Simplified Characters'' (initially published in 1964, last revised in 1986), and the ''List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese'' (1988), while also refining and improving it based on the current usage of characters in mainland China. After 8 years of development, a draft for public comment was released on August 12, 2009. It was officially promulgated on June 5, 2013, becoming the standard for the use of Chinese characters in general societal applications, and all previously related character lists were discontinued from that date.
Of the characters included, 3,500 are in Tier 1 and designated as frequently used characters; Tier 2 includes 3,000 characters that are designated as commonly used characters but less frequently used than those in Tier 1; Tier 3 includes characters commonly used as names and terminology. The list also offers a table of correspondences between 2,546 Simplified Chinese characters and 2,574 Traditional Chinese characters, along with other selected variant forms. This table replaced all previous related standards, and provides the authoritative list of characters and
glyph shapes for
Simplified Chinese
Simplification, Simplify, or Simplified may refer to:
Mathematics
Simplification is the process of replacing a mathematical expression by an equivalent one that is simpler (usually shorter), according to a well-founded ordering. Examples include: ...
in China. The Table eliminates 500 characters that were in the previous version. This project was led by Professor Wan Ning from the
Beijing Normal University
Beijing Normal University (BNU) () is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education (China), Ministry of Education of China, and co-funded by the Ministry of Education and the B ...
's School of Chinese Language and Literature. Contributing to the project were Professor Wang Lijun, Associate Professor Bu Shixia, and Professor Ling Lijun, also from the School of Chinese Language and Literature. The Table underwent over 90 revisions over a span of 10 years before its release.
Non-BMP characters
In
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, some characters in the ''List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters'' are located outside of the
Basic Multilingual Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...
(BMP).
See also
*
The ''List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters'' with Mandarin readings
*
Pinyin reading index for the ''List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters''
*
Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters
* ''
''
* ''
Jōyō kanji
The are those kanji listed on the , officially announced by the Japanese Ministry of Education. The current List of jōyō kanji, list of 2,136 characters was issued in 2010. It is a slightly modified version of the tōyō kanji, kanji, which ...
'', a standardized list of
Chinese characters used in Japanese (kanji) published by the Japanese Ministry of Education
* ''
Basic Hanja for educational use'', a standardized list of
Chinese characters used in Korean (Hanja) published by the South Korean Ministry of Education
References
*
*
*
External links
{{wiktionary, Appendix:List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters
Chinese character lists