Chinese Chinese Writing

Stroke order Wikipedia

Stroke order refers to the way of writing Chinese characters. Each character is made up of a number of "strokes" (Chinese characters were originally written using a brush) which must be written in a prescribed order. A stroke is a single movement of the writing instrument.

Stroke order can refer to the numerical order in which strokes are written, or to the direction in which the writing instrument (brush, pen, or pencil) must move in writing a particular stroke.

There are precise rules for stroke order which are intended to maximize ease of writing and reading, to ease the process of learning to write (when one has learned the rules, one can infer the stroke order of most characters) as well as to aid in producing uniform characters. While children must learn and use correct stroke order in school, many adults ignore or forget the correct stroke order for certain characters, or develop idiosyncratic ways of writing. While this is rarely a problem in day-to-day writing, in brush-writing and East Asian calligraphy|calligraphy stroke order is of extreme importance; incorrectly ordered or written strokes can produce a visually unappealing or, occasionally, incorrect character.

The precise number of characters in existence is disputed. Estimates range from 40,000 to 80,000, but fluency in Chinese requires knowledge of approximately 3000-5000 and Japanese 2000-3000 characters. The number of strokes per character for most characters is between three and thirty.

Last Modified:   2005-02-27