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.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).