How many Chinese characters does China Yi * * have?

Xinhua News Agency recently released the latest statistical information. At present, the total number of Chinese characters has exceeded 80,000, while there are only 3,500 commonly used characters. Although the number of commonly used words has not changed much, the total number of fonts has increased. Why? There is no consensus on the total number of Chinese characters in China. Kangxi Dictionary, which has the evaluation of "Masterpiece of Chinese Characters", has an addendum at the back of the book, "All rare words are attached, and there are completely silent and meaningless words", which contains more than 40,000 Chinese characters. The Chinese Characters Sea published by 1994 contains 870 19 Chinese characters, while the Chinese Characters Font of Beijing Guoan Consulting Equipment Company, which has passed the expert appraisal, contains 9 125 1 Chinese characters with sources, which is said to be the most complete font in China at present. In sharp contrast to the huge Chinese character library, the number of variant characters commonly used in daily written language in past dynasties is generally controlled at three or four thousand. The number of Oracle Bone Inscriptions did not exceed the original script. The List of Common Words in Modern Chinese published by the State 1988 contains 2,500 common words and 1000 sub-common words, with a total of only 3,500 words. Ji Hengquan, former deputy director of the Institute of Language and Character Application of the State Language Committee, believes that the total number of characters in a country has increased or decreased, but the number of basic characters is relatively fixed. There are many Chinese characters which can be divided into many levels. There are more than 2,500 commonly used Chinese characters in China. As long as you master them, you can read modern Chinese written language skillfully. There are no more than 2,000 different Chinese characters in the five-volume Selected Works of Mao Zedong. The Chinese syllabus for primary schools stipulates that students should know 3000 Chinese characters. If they master more than 65,438+0,800 Chinese characters, they can read. Ji Hengquan said that writing is the carrier of history and culture and conveys certain information. In different social stages, the application characteristics of writing are different. With the development of society, some characters are gradually eliminated. From the perspective of modern Chinese, people need a simpler way to express their feelings. "There are more than 40,000 or even 90,000 Chinese characters, and I'm afraid many people can't remember them all their lives. There are many rare words in Chinese characters, even if you remember them, it is useless for the other party to understand them when communicating. " In this way, many uncommon words are gradually eliminated from common words. With the development of society, language is developing in order to express new things. Behind 90,000 words is the continuous progress of social life. Because of the long history of China characters, these characters constitute the main body of the Chinese character library, which is mainly reflected in the collections of Chinese characters compiled by the state, such as Shuowen Jiezi, Kangxi Dictionary, Chinese Dictionary and Chinese Ci Hai. In the development of language itself, a large number of variant characters and nonstandard words will inevitably appear. Just as Kong Yiji once insisted that there are four ways to write fennel, the variant characters in Chinese characters are an important reason for the growing family of Chinese characters. In 1950s, China made a list of variant characters, but this work was not completed. With the introduction of hanyu pinyin, this work has not been carried out to the end. Mr. Chao Jizhou, a professor in the Department of Language of the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained this. According to Mr. Qinglong Liu, a researcher at the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who participated in the compilation of Xinhua Dictionary and Modern Chinese Dictionary, collecting and sorting out such large fonts is not only for future reference, but also for printing Chinese characters, sorting out ancient books and studying abroad. It also provides a high-level font tool for making names and certificates and marking place names on the map of China. In the early 1990s, the country produced a national standard character list containing 20,902 characters, but in the process of using it, it was found that the character list was far from enough, and the supplementary work was still in progress. The reasons for sorting out the Chinese character library are as follows: First, in order to meet the international requirements of establishing international characters, an international common character library is established to facilitate the exchange of international characters. At present, the International ISO National Standards Committee is collecting characters from various countries; The second is to adapt to the development of computer input method and expand computer fonts. At present, the Institute of Computer Standardization of the Ministry of Information Industry is also working on the statistical collation of the Chinese character library, which has compiled nearly 70 thousand words; Thirdly, the font deformation in the development of Chinese characters makes some characters look different from Chinese characters and needs to be sorted out and unified.