Draft:Outline of Chinese characters

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Chinese characters:

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.

What type of thing are Chinese characters?

A Chinese character can be described as all of the following:

Glyph – a purposeful mark.

Grapheme – the underlying unit with that may have.

Logograph – a grapheme representing a morpheme, a unit of meaning.
Syllabograph – a grapheme representing a spoken syllable. Written Chinese functions.