Stroke order

Stroke order (Chinese: ?? b?shùn; Japanese: ?? hitsujun or ??? kaki-jun) refers to the way in which Chinese characters are written. The stroke order of a character gives the order and direction in which the brush strokes, or simply "strokes", are written.

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Chinese characters are used in various forms in modern Chinese languages, Japanese, and, in South Korea, for Korean. They are known as hànzì in Mandarin, kanji in Japanese, and hanja or hanmun in Korean.

Related Topics:
Chinese language - Japanese - South Korea - Korean - Hànzì - Mandarin - Kanji - Hanja

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Chinese characters were originally carved; the earliest extant examples are on the so-called oracle bones, scapulomancy fortune-telling devices on which the diviner inscribed his name, the date, and two possible outcomes (see image). Carving gradually gave way to writing on bamboo, silk and finally paper, using brushes and ink.

Related Topics:
Oracle bones - Scapulomancy - Bamboo - Silk - Paper - Brushes - Ink

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Although it would take thousands of years for uniform, defined forms for each character to appear, now, as then, characters comprise a number of strokes which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument, in modern times most commonly a pen, pencil, or writing brush.

Related Topics:
Pen - Pencil - Writing brush

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Stroke order can therefore refer to the numerical order in which strokes are written, or to the direction in which the writing instrument (brush, pen, or pencil) must move in writing a particular stroke.

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The precise number of Chinese characters in existence is disputed. The Japanese "Daikanwa Jiten", a modern comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, includes fifty thousand, and more recently published Chinese dictionaries have included more than eighty thousand, although whether these are all unique characters or merely obscure variant forms is debated. Regardless of the total number, literacy in Chinese requires knowledge of three to five thousand characters, and Japanese two to three thousand characters.

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The number of strokes per character for most characters is between one and thirty, but the number of strokes in some obscure characters can reach as much as seventy. In the twentieth century, drastic simplification of Chinese characters took place in mainland China, greatly reducing the number of strokes in each character, and a similar but more moderate simplification also took place in Japan. However, the basic rules of stroke order remained the same.

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