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 given name
Chinese given names are almost always made up of one or two characters and are written "after" the surname. Therefore, Wei () of the Zhang () family is called "Zhang Wei" and not "Wei Zhang". Despite the relative paucity of Chinese surnames, given names can theoretically include any of the Chinese language's 100,000 characters and contain almost any meaning.