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.
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".