Chinese characters
Literary and vernacular Chinese

Words in Classical Chinese were generally a single character in length. An estimated 25–30% of the vocabulary used in Classical Chinese texts consists of two-character words. Over time, the introduction of multi-syllable vocabulary into vernacular varieties of Chinese was encouraged by phonetic shifts that increased the number of homophones. The most common process of Chinese word formation after the Classical period has been to create compounds of existing words. Words have also been created by appending affixes to words, by reduplication, and by borrowing words from other languages. While multi-syllable words are generally written with one character per syllable, abbreviations are occasionally used. For example, 二十 (èrshí; ' twenty ') may be written as the contracted form 廿.

Sometimes, different morphemes come to be represented by characters with identical shapes. For example, 行 may represent either ' road ' (xíng) or the extended sense of ' row ' (háng): these morphemes are ultimately cognates that diverged in pronunciation but remained written with the same character. However, Qiu reserves the term homograph to describe identically shaped characters with different meanings that emerge via processes other than semantic extension. An example homograph is 铊; 鉈, which originally meant ' weight used at a steelyard ' (tuó). In the 20th century, this character was created again with the meaning ' thallium ' (tā). Both of these characters are phono-semantic compounds with ⾦ 'GOLD' as the semantic component and 它 as the phonetic component, but the words represented by each are not related.

There are a number of ' dialect characters ' (方言字; fāngyánzì) that are not used in standard written vernacular Chinese, but reflect the vocabulary of other spoken varieties. The most complete example of an orthography based on a variety other than Standard Chinese is Written Cantonese. A common Cantonese character is 冇 (mou5; ' to not have '), derived by removing two strokes from 有 (jau5; ' to have '). It is common to use standard characters to transcribe previously unwritten words in Chinese dialects when obvious cognates exist. When no obvious cognate exists due to factors like irregular sound changes, semantic drift, or an origin in a non-Chinese language, characters are often borrowed or invented to transcribe the word—either ad hoc, or according to existing principles. These new characters are generally phono-semantic compounds.
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