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 Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters
The List of Graphemes of Commonly-used Chinese Characters () is a list of 4762 commonly used Chinese characters and their standardized forms prescribed by the Hong Kong Education Bureau to be taught in primary and Middle schools in Hong Kong. The list was last updated in 2007, included as an appendix to the "Hong Kong Chinese Lexical Lists for Primary Learning" (). In 2012, the list was published as a hardcover book, with Cantonese and Putonghua pronunciations and simple English explanations for every character.