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.
The Five Thousand Dictionary
Each dictionary page has six columns (Fenn 1942: iv-v). The 1st column of each entry gives the head character, with any variant Chinese characters underneath linked by a line at the left, and the Standard Chinese tone indicated by a superscript on the character for the 4 tonal categories and a dot before it for the unstressed neutral tone (for example, s.v. "nü", "|⋅兒 a girl" for "nǚ'ér" (女兒 "daughter; girl") (1942: 369)). Most Chinese characters are classified as radical-phonetic characters that combine a semantically indicative "radical" with a phonologically indicative "phonetic". The 2nd column gives the head character's radical with its number in the 214 Kangxi radicals, and the 3rd gives the phonetic with its number in Soothill's dictionary (1900). The 4th column gives English translation equivalents for the character, common words written with it (abbreviated as "|" vertical bar), and indicates whether the character pronunciation is colloquial (俗) or literary (文), and whether it is used as a Classifier (C) or as a Surname (S). The 5th column gives alternate readings of the character, under which the user may find further information. The 6th column roughly indicates how frequently the character is used in Chinese, using the North China Union Language School's arrangement of the 5,000 character flashcards in ten groups of 500 each, lettered from A to K, with A for the 500 most commonly used characters and K for the 500 least commonly used.