Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
List of longest novels
A particular difficulty is created when comparing word counts across different writing systems. The logographic Chinese characters used to write East Asian languages each represent one "morpheme" and are not separated by spaces. The same character may at times stand for one word, and other times form part of a larger word. For instance the characters "zhong" 中 and "guo" 囯 can be used independently to mean "middle" and "kingdom", respectively, but can also be combined into "Zhongguo" 中囯, "China" (i.e. "The Middle Kingdom"). One could theoretically construct a noun phrase "Zhongguo zhong guo" 中囯中囯 meaning "kingdoms in the middle of China". The absence of any formal marking of word boundaries means that it would be difficult to mechanically determine if such a phrase consists of two, three, or four words without knowing Chinese. East Asian bibliographies therefore generally give only the "character count" without attempting any "word count".