When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinesewere generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language

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Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies. A few characters, including some of the most commonly used, were originally pictograms,

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Legendary origins
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is

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Chinese character simplification is the overall reduction of the number of strokes in the regular script of a set of Chinese characters.
Simplification in China
The use of traditional Chinese characters versus simplified Chinese

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There are numerous styles, or scripts, in which Chinese characters can be written, deriving from various calligraphic and historical models. Most of

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Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters mostly occupying the x-height, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area in which the components of every character are written to fit

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The Chinese script spread to Korea together with Buddhism from the 2nd century BC to 5th century AD (hanja). This was adopted for recording

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