History of education
Although there are more than 40,000 Chinese characters in written Chinese, many are rarely used. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.
Chinese language
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume "Hanyu Da Cidian", records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised "Cihai", a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.