Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
A team of scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing developed a free web edition of "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" and published it online in 1999. The web edition comprises a total of 8,169 head characters, 40,379 entries of Chinese words or phrases, and 44,407 explanatory entries of grammatical usage. Chinese character encoding is in the Big5 system (which includes 13,053 traditional Chinese characters), which does not encode simplified Chinese characters or uncommon characters (represented as "□" in the dictionary) included in Unicode's 80,388 CJK Unified Ideographs. The web edition dictionary replaces Lin Yutang's obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh system with modern standard pinyin romanization, which users can hear pronounced through speech synthesis. It also abandons Lin's obsolete Instant Index System, which "has not been widely used since its inception", and provides three machine-generated indexes by radical, pinyin, and English.