A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode (2018)
This might be interesting read to those unfamiliar with CJK, but character bloat(?) isn&#x27;t remotely a recent thing. It&#x27;s actually at least a couple hundred years old.<p>The Kangxi dictionary (1716), an authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters, contains definitions for 47035 characters, even though only a couple thousand are in common use. Quoting from Wikipedia: &quot;The dictionary was the largest of the traditional dictionaries, containing 47,035 characters. Some 40% of them are graphic variants, however, while others are dead, archaic, or found only once. Fewer than a quarter of the characters it contains are now in common use.&quot;<p>All of these archaic (or even bogus in some cases) characters found in the dictionary are now part of the Unicode standard, of course :) The unihan database even has a field that shows the page number where the character appears in the Kangxi dictionary. If you&#x27;re wondering why 65536 characters isn&#x27;t enough for everyone, the junk in Kangxi dictionary is a significant contribution.