Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 24, 2025
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions influenced by Chinese culture. The function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly over the past three millennia. Unlike letters in alphabets that directly reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes—the units of meaning in a language—often encoding aspects of pronunciation as well as meaning. Writing all of a language's frequently used vocabulary requires 2000–3000 characters; as of 2024, nearly 100,000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard. Characters are composed of strokes written in a fixed order. Historically, methods of writing them include inscribing stone, bone, or bronze; brushing ink onto silk, bamboo, or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. More recent technologies using Chinese characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. (Full article...)