Common Chinese Characters (Hanzi)

The first group on this page is the 100 most frequent characters in modern written Chinese, in rank order. 的 de is number one by a wide margin: it is the possessive and linking particle (我的 wǒ de 'my', 红的 hóng de 'the red one') and by itself accounts for about 4 % of all running text. Then come 一 yī 'one', 是 shì 'is, to be', 不 bù 'not', 了 le (the particle that marks a completed action), 在 zài 'at, in', 人 rén 'person', 有 yǒu 'to have, there is', 我 wǒ 'I' and 他 tā 'he'. Most of the top 100 are like this: grammar words, pronouns and the everyday verbs and nouns no sentence gets far without, 这 'this', 个 (the general measure word), 们 (plural for people), 中 'middle', 来 'come', 上 'up, on', 大 'big', 为 'for', 和 'and', 国 'country'.

The 100 together cover roughly 42 % of all the characters in a newspaper, novel or chat, and the first 500 about 76 %. That is why learners meet these first, and why they read the same whether the text is a classical poem's modern translation or a subway sign. Pronouns in the list: 我 I, 你 you, 他 he, 她 she, 它 it, 们 for plural (我们 we, 你们 you all, 他们 they). The numbers 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九 十 are all here, as are 百 hundred, 千 thousand, 万 ten thousand and 亿 hundred million, and the directions 东 east, 南 south, 西 west, 北 north with 中 centre. Nature's basics, 日 sun, 月 moon, 水 water, 火 fire, 山 mountain, 木 tree, 金 metal, 土 earth, 人 person, 口 mouth, 手 hand, are among the oldest characters in the writing system and still among the most used.

The characters people copy most for their meaning are here too: 爱 ài love, 福 fú good fortune, 喜 xǐ joy (doubled as 囍 on weddings, which lives on the Chinese Characters page), 寿 shòu long life, 龙 lóng dragon and 凤 fèng phoenix as the imperial pair, 马 mǎ horse, 和 hé harmony, 美 měi beautiful, 家 jiā home, 心 xīn heart, 梦 mèng dream. Each character on this page has its own article with its meanings, pinyin and example words; click through before you put one on anything permanent.

What the 2,500 常用字 list is, and how this page orders it

The membership of this page is the 2,500 常用字 chángyòngzì, 'frequently used characters', the first level of the 现代汉语常用字表 (List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese) that China's State Language Commission and National Education Committee published in 1988. The list has 3,500 characters in two levels, the 2,500 frequently used and 1,000 'next most used' (次常用字); when it was drawn up the 2,500 were measured to cover 97.97 % of modern texts and the full 3,500 99.48 %. It was the base for school textbooks and literacy standards for 25 years. In 2013 the 通用规范汉字表 (Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, 8,105 characters) replaced it; its Level 1 is exactly the same 3,500 characters, so the 2,500 on this page are also the first 2,500 of today's standard. Checked against Unicode's Unihan database, every one of them is a Level 1 character of the 2013 table, and every one is in the original Unicode block of 20,992 CJK Unified Ideographs, which is to say in every Chinese font ever shipped.

The published list sorts the characters by stroke count, which is useful for looking up a character you can see but not read, and useless for learning. This page orders them by frequency instead, using Jun Da's Modern Chinese character frequency list (2004), a count over a corpus of 193,504,018 characters of modern texts, news and fiction together. In that count the 2,500 characters here add up to 98.1 % of all running text. The groups follow the ranks: the top 100, then 101–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–1,500, 1,501–2,000 and 2,001–2,500, each row labelled with its rank range, so the first rows are the characters a beginner must know and the last rows (蘑 mushroom, 橙 orange, 蝙 bat, 蚯 earthworm) are the words a child learns at primary school but a newspaper rarely needs.

Frequency and the 1988 selection do not agree perfectly: the committee included a few hundred everyday words for things (身体 body parts, foods, animals, chemistry terms like 氮 nitrogen and 钠 sodium) that corpus counts rank lower than some rarer literary characters. That is why the last group holds characters Jun Da ranks around 3,000 to 4,100, while a few characters that rank inside his top 2,500 are not on this list. The Rare & Complex Chinese Characters page covers the other end of the scale, and the Chinese Characters page is the general introduction with numbers, zodiac animals, pinyin tone letters and Chinese punctuation; this page is the complete frequency-ordered reference.

How Chinese characters work: one syllable each, words of two, radicals inside

Chinese has no alphabet. Each character writes one syllable and usually carries a meaning of its own, and most modern words are two characters put together: 中 'middle' + 国 'country' = 中国 Zhōngguó China; 学 'study' + 生 'born, pupil' = 学生 xuéshēng student; 电 'electric' + 脑 'brain' = 电脑 diànnǎo computer. So 2,500 characters are not 2,500 words: they combine into tens of thousands. The sound of a character is written out with pinyin, Latin letters with tone marks (的 de, 一 yī, 是 shì, 不 bù); the pinyin tone letters ā á ǎ à are on the Chinese Characters page and the Taiwanese phonetic symbols ㄅㄆㄇ on the Bopomofo (Zhuyin Symbols) page.

Inside the characters there is a system. About 58 % of the 3,500 frequent characters are phono-semantic compounds: one part hints at the meaning, the other at the sound. 妈 mā 'mother' is 女 'woman' + 马 mǎ (sound); 河 hé 'river' is 氵 'water' + 可 kě (sound); 请 qǐng 'please' is 讠 'speech' + 青 qīng. The meaning parts are the radicals, the 214 classifying components dictionaries sort by; they are on the Chinese Radicals & Strokes page. A few hundred of the simplest characters are pictures or diagrams that go back to the oracle-bone inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty, 13th to 11th century BCE: 日 sun, 月 moon, 人 person, 山 mountain, 木 tree, 口 mouth, 一 二 三 one two three.

The characters here are the simplified forms used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia, the result of the simplification schemes of 1956 and 1964 (final list 1986; a 1977 second round was withdrawn in 1986). Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau write the traditional forms: 国 is 國, 学 is 學, 爱 is 愛, 们 is 們. Roughly a third of the characters on this page differ between the two; the others (人 大 中 山 一) are identical. The Traditional Chinese Characters page is the counterpart of this one, and the Cantonese Characters page covers the characters Hong Kong writes for spoken Cantonese. Japanese kanji are the same writing system borrowed in the first millennium; the Kanji (Japanese Characters) page lists Japan's official set, and many characters here (日 本 人 山 水 大 学) are read and written identically in Japanese.

Writing direction: modern Chinese runs left to right in horizontal lines like English. Classical books, calligraphy, shop signs and some Taiwanese newspapers also use vertical columns read top to bottom, columns moving right to left, and Unicode characters do not change for either; the software does the arranging.

How to type Chinese characters, and the fonts that show them

Nobody types characters one stroke at a time. You add a Chinese pinyin keyboard (Windows: Microsoft Pinyin under Chinese (Simplified); macOS and iPhone: Pinyin – Simplified; Android: Gboard's Chinese Pinyin), type the pinyin without tones, zhongguo, and pick 中国 from the candidate bar. Phones also offer handwriting input, where you draw the character with a finger, and mainland users often install Sogou Pinyin. In Microsoft Word you can type a character's Unicode code and press Alt+X: 4E2D then Alt+X gives 中, 7231 Alt+X gives 爱. Shape-based methods like Wubi (五笔) exist for fast typists but are not needed to copy a word. For anything quick, click a character on this page to copy it.

Every current Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and ChromeOS system ships a Chinese font that covers all 2,500 characters here (Microsoft YaHei and SimSun on Windows, PingFang SC on Apple systems, Noto Sans CJK on Android and ChromeOS), so the characters display anywhere, including Discord, Instagram bios and game names. One thing to know: because Unicode unifies Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, a few of them look slightly different depending on whether the font is a Chinese or a Japanese one. 骨 'bone' and 直 'straight' have different standard shapes in China and Japan while being the same code point. If a Chinese word appears in a Japanese-styled font, that is why; tag the text as Chinese (lang="zh") in a web page, or choose a Chinese font, and the mainland shapes appear.

Look-alikes to avoid when copying: 口 kǒu 'mouth' (U+53E3) is not the katakana ロ ro nor the enclosure radical 囗 (U+56D7); 一 yī 'one' is not the katakana long-vowel mark ー nor the em dash —; 力 lì 'strength' is not katakana カ, 工 'work' is not エ, 夕 'evening' is not タ. The Kangxi radical characters ⼈ ⼝ ⼭ (U+2F00 block) look exactly like 人 口 山 but are compatibility characters meant for dictionaries only; search engines and input methods do not treat them as the real characters. Always copy the ones from this page, which are the standard CJK Unified Ideographs.

Chinese characters for names, jewelry, tattoos and red envelopes: check before you copy

The characters people search for most are the lucky ones. 福 fú 'good fortune' is pasted on doors at Chinese New Year, often upside down because 福倒 'fortune upside down' sounds like 福到 'fortune arrives'; it is the character on red envelopes (红包 hóngbāo) along with 恭喜发财 'wishing you prosperity' and 新年快乐 'happy new year'. 寿 shòu long life goes on birthday gifts for elders, 喜 xǐ on wedding things, 爱 ài love and 缘 yuán fate-bound connection on jewelry, 龙 dragon, 虎 tiger and 凤 phoenix on the zodiac and on temple roofs. The Chinese New Year Emoji page has the festival emoji to pair them with (🧧 🏮 🐉).

Before a tattoo or an engraving, read the character's own article here, not a tattoo parlour's flash sheet. Most characters have several meanings and only one of them is the flattering one: 机 means both 'machine' and 'opportunity', 气 is 'air' and 'anger' and 'qi', 行 is 'to walk' and 'OK' and 'a bank', 便 is both 'convenient' and 'excrement'. A single character on its own also often reads like a fragment to a Chinese reader, the way 'strong' on a wall would to an English one. Two-character words, 勇气 yǒngqì courage, 自由 zìyóu freedom, 希望 xīwàng hope, 平安 píng'ān peace and safety, read as the real thing.

Chinese names are chosen from the same common characters, which is why 'Chinese characters for names' leads here: family names like 王 Wáng, 李 Lǐ, 张 Zhāng, 刘 Liú, 陈 Chén and given-name favourites 伟 great, 芳 fragrant, 娜 graceful, 敏 quick-witted, 静 quiet, 强 strong, 明 bright, 华 splendid are all in the 2,500. A name is usually two or three characters, surname first: 王伟 Wáng Wěi. Foreign names are written by sound with a conventional set of characters (马克 Mǎkè Mark, 安娜 Ānnà Anna), and a Chinese friend or teacher will choose far better ones than a translation app.