金 土 龍
Logographic · ~100,000 characters
Hanzi
The largest living symbol system: characters built from a few hundred recurring components and radicals, combining sound and sense. Read here for their symbolism — each glyph a small machine of compressed meaning. The characters’ deeper philosophy and cosmology live at the Hanzi Museum, hanzi.design — the system’s annex.
- Grammar
- Components combine spatially, not in a line — left/right, top/bottom, enclosure. Most characters are semantic–phonetic compounds (形聲): one part fixes the field of meaning, the other the sound. The traditional analysis sorts every character into six such categories, 六書.
- Governance
- No owner, and three standardising authorities that disagree: the PRC’s Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (2013), Taiwan’s Ministry of Education standard forms, and Japan’s jōyō kanji list. The same character, three official shapes.
- Members
- 水 火 木 金 土 龍 — read here for symbolism; the philosophy and cosmology at hanzi.design, the system’s annex.
§Its members
A selection. The system runs to roughly a hundred thousand characters; the whole of it is in the CJK Unified Ideographs blocks.
Sources · 3
- documented Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字, c. 100 CE — the first systematic analysis, and the source of the six categories.
- documented Table of General Standard Chinese Characters 通用规范汉字表, State Council of the PRC, 2013.
- documented The Unicode Standard, CJK Unified Ideographs and its extensions.