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30-520: There are 13 hanja with this reading, and three variant forms , on the South Korean government's official list of hanja which may be used in given names; they are: People with the given name Kwang include: People with the nickname or stage name Kwang include: Korean given names containing the syllable Kwang include: Variant Chinese character Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinct glyphs that represent

60-500: A 'compendium' or 'standard' or 'model' characters, as to show their correct forms and authoritative pronunciations. The compendium was generally referred to simply as zidian , which later became a standard Chinese word for 'dictionary' in the 19th century, and used to title practically every Chinese dictionary published since then. Classical Chinese is largely morphosyllabic with very few bound morphemes , meaning that most individual characters represented independent words. As such,

90-508: A list of 214 radicals , and further sorted by the number of additional strokes in the character. Although this particular set of 214 radicals was first used in the Zihui , they are now largely known as the Kangxi radicals , and remain popular as a method of categorizing Chinese characters. The character entries provide definitions and pronunciations in both traditional fanqie spelling and with

120-573: A modern homophone , as well as example quotations from the Chinese corpus, and lists of any variants and differing meanings. The compendium also contains rime tables with characters ordered by syllable rime classes, tones , as well as initial syllable onsets . The missionary Walter Henry Medhurst , an early translator of the Bible into Chinese, compiled Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary (1842–1843) in two volumes, with Chinese sourced from

150-405: A result of the process of Han unification . In Han unification, some variants that are nearly identical between Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-speaking regions are encoded in the same code point , and can only be distinguished using different typefaces . Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points. On webpages , displaying the correct variants for the intended language

180-527: A review board to compile an officially sanctioned supplement to the Kangxi Zidian , which was published in 1831 as the Zidian kaozheng ( 字典考證 ), correcting 2,588 mistakes mostly found in quotations and citations. The supplemented dictionary contains 47,035 distinct character entries, in addition to 1,995 graphical variants , giving a total of 49,030 different characters. They are grouped according to

210-463: Is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing , considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters . Wanting an improvement upon earlier dictionaries, as well as to show his concern for Confucian culture and to foster standardization of the Chinese writing system, its compilation was ordered by

240-427: Is available in many forms, from Qing dynasty block print editions, to reprints using traditional Chinese bookbinding , to Western-style hardcovers including revisions and ancillary essays, to a digitized version accessible via the internet. In his preface to the 1716 printing, the emperor wrote: The emperor chose the term zidian himself—at the time not having a meaning of 'dictionary', but rather something like

270-508: Is dependent on the typefaces installed on the computer, the configuration of the web browser and the language tags of web pages. Systems that are ready to display the correct variants are rare because many computer users do not have standard typefaces installed and the most popular web browsers are not configured to display the correct variants by default. The following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with different code points and language tags. The following examples have

300-491: Is provided". The scholar-official Wang Xihou (1713–1777) criticized the Kangxi Zidian in the preface of his own Ziguan dictionary. When the Qianlong Emperor —Kangxi's grandson—was informed of this insult in 1777, he sentenced Wang's entire family to death by the nine familial exterminations , the most extreme form of capital punishment. However, as was fairly typical in such cases with literary inquisition,

330-452: Is the direct regularization and linearization of shapes to convert them into clerical forms while preserving their original structure. For example, the character for 'year' was underwent liding to the clerical script form 秊 , while the same character after undergoing libian resulted in the orthodox form 年 . Similarly, libian and liding created the two distinct characters 虎 and 乕 for 'tiger'. There are variants that arise through

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360-523: The Chancellor of Qin, attempted to universalize the Qin small seal script across China following the wars that had politically unified the country for the first time. Li prescribed the 朙 form of the word for 'bright', but some scribes ignored this and continued to write the character as 明 . However, the increased usage of 朙 was followed by proliferation of a third variant: 眀 , with 目 'eye' on

390-422: The Kangxi form. Orthodox and vulgar forms may only differ by the length or location of individual strokes, whether certain strokes intersect, or the presence or absence of minor strokes (dots). These are often not considered to amount to being discrete variants. For instance, 述 is the new form of the character with traditional orthography 述 'recount', 'describe'. As another example, the surname 吴 , also

420-536: The Kangxi Emperor in 1710, from whom the compendium gets its name. The dictionary was the largest of its kind, containing 47,043 character entries. Around 40% of them were graphical variants, while others were dead, archaic, or found only once in the Classical Chinese corpus. In today's vernacular written Chinese, fewer than a quarter of the dictionary's characters are commonly used. The text

450-407: The "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphical form ( 字体 ; 字體 ; zìtǐ ), "overall changes in the distinguishing features of graphic[al] shape and calligraphic style, [...] in most cases refer[ring] to rather obvious and rather substantial changes". Libian often involved significant omissions, additions, or transmutations of the forms used by Qin small seal script, while liding

480-453: The 20th century, variation in the shape of characters was ubiquitous, a dynamic which continued after the invention of woodblock printing . For example, prior to the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙 —with either 日 'Sun' or 囧 'window' on the left, with the 月 'Moon' component on the right. Li Si ( d.  208 BC ),

510-692: The IVD established, it's no longer needed to encode any new compatibility ideograph to render them; the two blocks CJK Compatibility Ideographs in the BMP and CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement in the SIP are now frozen since Unicode 4.1, except to fix a few past mistakes that were forgotten during the Han unification process for the review of normative sources). Kangxi Dictionary The Kangxi Dictionary ( Chinese : 康熙字典 ; pinyin : Kāngxī zìdiǎn )

540-688: The ancient form 于 , now used as its simplified form. In each case above, variants were merged into single simplified forms. Character forms that are most orthodox are known as orthodox variants ( 正字 ; zhèngzì ), which is sometimes taken as mean the forms present in the Kangxi Dictionary ( 康熙字典體 ; Kāngxī zìdiǎn tǐ ), which usually represent the orthodox forms used in late imperial China. Non-orthodox forms are known as folk variants ( 俗字 ; súzì ; Revised Romanization : sokja ; Hepburn : zokuji ). Some folk variants are longstanding abbreviations or calligraphic forms, and later became

570-728: The appropriate language or script, and allows easier and more selective control when the same language/script combination needs several variants). The list of valid variation sequences is standardized by Unicode, defined in the Ideographic Variation Database (IVD), part of the Unicode Characters Database (UCD), and it is expansible without reencoding new code points in the UCS (and since the Unicode versions where variation selectors were encoded and

600-451: The basis for the simplified forms adopted on the mainland. For example, 痴 is a folk variant corresponding to the orthodox form 癡 'foolish'. These forms differ by their phonetic component, with the folk variant using a character with a "close enough" pronunciation but having much less strokes and thus quicker to write. In mainland China, simplified forms are called xin zixing , typically contrasting with jiu zixing , which are usually

630-407: The compilers did not make a distinction between senses of 字 ; zì as 'characters' versus as 'words'; this distinction would only begin to be clearly made during the late 19th century. The original editors included Zhang Yushu (1642–1711), Chen Tingjing (1639–1712), and a further staff of thirty men. However, both Zhang and Chen died within a year of their appointment to the task, and the work

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660-421: The emperor commuted the sentence by pardoning all of Wang's relatives, and his grandsons given only a procedural sentence of execution at the autumn assizes ( qiushen ), during which the case would be reviewed and usually spared actual execution. Wang's own sentence would be commuted from death by a thousand cuts , to merely death by beheading. The later Daoguang Emperor appointed Wang Yinzhi (1766–1834) and

690-464: The left—likely derived as a contraction of 朙 . Ultimately, 明 became the character's standard form. New variants also result from larger shifts in the writing system as a whole, such as the process of libian and liding that resulted in the clerical script . According to the palaeographer Qiu Xigui, the broadest trend in the evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphical shape ( 字形 ; zìxíng ),

720-468: The modern language, even though 飢 initially meant 'insufficient food to satiate' and 饑 meant 'famine' in Old Chinese . The two characters formerly belonged to two different Old Chinese rime groups ( 脂 and 微 groups, respectively) and thus indicated they had different pronunciations back then. A similar situation is responsible for the existence of variants of the particle 於 'in' which had

750-641: The name of an ancient state , is the 'new character shape' form of the character traditionally written 吳 . Character variant exist throughout every writing system that uses Chinese characters, including written Chinese , Japanese , and Korean . Several governments of countries that speak these languages have standardized their writing systems by specifying certain variants as the standard form. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some bifurcation of written Chinese between simplified and traditional forms . The standardization of simplified forms in Japan

780-508: The same code points, but different language tags. However language tags rarely work correctly to get the expected forms from text renderers (e.g. in the table below where all rendered glyphs may look the same). Instead, the Unicode standard allows encoding these variants as variation sequences , by appending a variation selector (a glyph-less non-spacing mark) to the standard CJK unified ideograph (it also works directly inside plain text, without needing to use any rich text format to select

810-473: The same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet , such as the double-storey ⟨a⟩ and single-storey ⟨ɑ⟩ variants of the letter A, with the latter more commonly appearing in handwriting . Some contexts require usage of specific variants. Before

840-563: The use of different radicals to refer to specific definitions of a polysemous character. For instance, the character 雕 could mean either 'a type of hawk' or 'carve'. Variants using different radicals to specify thus developed: 鵰 with a ⿃   'BIRD' radical and 琱 with a ⽟   'JADE' . In rare cases, two characters in ancient Chinese with similar meanings were confused and conflated when their modern Chinese readings have merged, for example, 飢 and 饑 , are both read as jī and mean 'famine', used interchangeably in

870-410: Was distinct from the process in mainland China. The standard character forms prescribed by the government of each region are described in: However, it is noted that the traditional printing orthography (or commonly known as jiu zixing ) is the de facto standard used by Traditional Chinese communities outside of educational usage . Unicode deals with variant characters in a complex manner, as

900-493: Was taken up by scholars of the Hanlin Academy . The compilation was based partly on two Ming dynasty dictionaries: the 1615 Zihui by Mei Yingzuo, and the 1627 Zhengzitong by Zhang Zilie. The imperial edict required that the project be completed within a five-year span. As such, errors were inevitable. Although the emperor's preface said "each and every definition is given in detail and every single pronunciation

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