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Chinese Writing

Chinese Writing and Character History

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Chinese writing is one of the world's oldest continuously used writing systems. The characters you see in a modern Word file sit at the end of a long line: oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, seal script, clerical and regular scripts, then the twentieth-century simplification movement.

These articles are historical and linguistic. They are here so conversion is not a black box. When you change 马 to 馬, you are choosing one living standard over another, not inventing a new language.

A path through the section

  1. The history of Chinese writing
  2. Oracle bone script
  3. How characters are constructed
  4. Chinese radicals
  5. How characters became Simplified
  6. Why Traditional Chinese is still used

If your goal is practical conversion, return to the Chinese conversion guides or the text converter.

The History of Chinese Writing

A short history of Chinese writing from early inscriptions to modern Simplified and Traditional standards.

Oracle Bone Script: The Earliest Chinese Writing

What oracle bone script is, why it matters, and how it relates to characters still used in Chinese today.

Bronze Inscriptions and the Development of Chinese Characters

How Zhou bronze inscriptions sit between oracle bone script and later standardized Chinese writing.

Seal Script and the Standardization of Chinese Writing

How Qin-era seal script relates to the idea of a standard Chinese character set.

How Chinese Characters Became Simplified

How official Simplified Chinese character lists were introduced and how they relate to Traditional Chinese today.

Why Traditional Chinese Characters Are Still Used

Why Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and many overseas communities continue to use Traditional Chinese characters.

What Are Chinese Radicals?

Chinese radicals are indexing components used in dictionaries and in how people talk about character structure.

How Chinese Characters Are Constructed

Pictographs, ideographs, phonetic compounds and why most modern Chinese characters are not simple pictures.

How Chinese Characters Developed From Pictures

Which Chinese characters began as pictures, and why most writing today is not pictographic.