How many written Chinese characters are there?
An eleventh-century rhyme dictionary, the Jiyun, contains 53,525 characters. The great Kangxi Dictionary, published in 1710 and used by several generations of Western sinologists, contains 47,033 characters. A recent compendium, the Hanyu da zidian, contains over 60,000 characters. But several modern studies have shown that the average educated Chinese person commands somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 characters.
