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.
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals. The twelve most frequent radicals are given at the bottom of the pages for the dictionary user to memorize. "To insure further the finding of the characters, the authors have entered each character under all its apparently possible radicals and made a cross reference to the main entry" (1947: xxvi). For instance, 魯 "luu" is entered under radical 72 曰 "sun", with the note "See Rad. 195 魚 ["fish"]." The "Concise Dictionary" includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 "ell" Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ "ke" National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial "k""), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese" (Luo 1947: 434).