Chinese characters (, meaning the semiotic sign, symbol, or glyph part) should not be confused with Chinese words (, meaning phrases or vocabulary words, consisting from a group of characters or possibly a single character), as the majority of modern Chinese words, unlike their Old Chinese and Middle Chinese counterparts, are more frequently written with two or more characters, each character representing one syllable and/or morpheme. Knowing the meanings of the individual characters of a word will often allow the general meaning of the word to be inferred, but this is not always the case.
