Written Chinese
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.
Chinese characters
Modified radicals and new variants are two common reasons for the ever-increasing number of characters. There are about 300 radicals and 100 are in common use. Creating a new character by modifying the radical is an easy way to disambiguate homographs among "xíngshēngzì" pictophonetic compounds. This practice began long before the standardization of Chinese script by Qin Shi Huang and continues to the present day. The traditional 3rd-person pronoun "tā" ( "he, she, it"), which is written with the "person radical", illustrates modifying significs to form new characters. In modern usage, there is a graphic distinction between "tā" ( "she") with the "woman radical", "tā" ( "it") with the "animal radical", "tā" ( "it") with the "roof radical", and "tā" ( "He") with the "deity radical", One consequence of modifying radicals is the fossilization of rare and obscure variant logographs, some of which are not even used in Classical Chinese. For instance, "he" "harmony, peace", which combines the "grain radical" with the "mouth radical", has infrequent variants with the radicals reversed and with the "flute radical".