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Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages.

In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì.

They have been adapted to write a number of other languages including: Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja, and Vietnamese in a system known as chữ Nôm.

Collectively, they are known as CJK characters.

In English, they are sometimes called Han characters.

Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.

By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

Stroke order (Yale: bāt seuhn; hitsujun or kaki-jun; pilsun or hoeksun; Vietnamese: bút thuận 筆順) refers to the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character (or Chinese derivative character) are written.

A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface.

Chinese characters are used in various forms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and in Vietnamese.

They are known as Hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, and Hán tự in Vietnamese.

A Chinese-English Dictionary (1892), compiled by the British consular officer and sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), is the first Chinese-English encyclopedic dictionary.

Giles started compilation after being rebuked for criticizing mistranslations in Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language.

The 1,461-page first edition contains 13,848 Chinese character head entries alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade-Giles system, which Giles modified from Thomas Wade's (1867) system.

Giles' dictionary furthermore gives pronunciations from nine regional varieties of Chinese, and three Sino-Xenic languages Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

Giles revised his dictionary into the 1,813-page second edition (1912) with the addition of 67 more entries and numerous usage examples.

Chinese as a foreign or second language is the study of the Chinese varieties by non-native speakers.

Increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of Standard Chinese ("Mandarin") as a foreign language, the official language of mainland China and Taiwan.

However, the teaching of Chinese both within and outside China is not a recent phenomenon.

Westerners began learning different Chinese varieties in the 16th century.

Within China, Mandarin became the official language in the early 20th century.

Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan when the Kuomintang took over control from Japan after World War II.

Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion through the inscription or recording of signs and symbols.

In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language.

Writing is not a language but a form of technology that developed as tools developed with human society.

Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols.

The result of writing is generally called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader.

Motivations for writing include publication, storytelling, correspondence and diary.

Writing has been instrumental in keeping history, maintaining culture, dissemination of knowledge through the media and the formation of legal systems.