Welcome! Alone among modern languages, Chinese integrates both meaning and pronunciation information in its characters. Zhongwen.com deciphers this rich information to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters, one of humanity's greatest and most enduring cultural achievements. Until recent centuries, China had one of the highest literacy rates in the world and more than half of the world's literature was written in Chinese characters. Due to the central role of calligraphy in Chinese art and the vitality of Chinese civilization, Chinese characters have had a similarly preeminent position in the world's art.

Despite these unparalleled achievements, many people this century have viewed Chinese characters as inferior to the more purely phonetic writing systems of Western languages. As a result, China nearly decided to abolish characters in the 1950s, and even now most Chinese are not taught the rich tradition behind their writing system. This website counters the simplistic myth of character inferiority by translating traditional Chinese character etymologies into English to show how Chinese themselves have used and understood the symbols they created. While Chinese characters are often thought of as overly complex, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs (these wen are more fundamental than bushous or "radicals") in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember.

Other than making a wider range of traditional Chinese etymologies available in English, the main contribution of this site is the series of zipu or "character genealogies" which show graphically the close interconnections between all the characters. This new system generalizes the usual radical system by allowing any character to be found if the viewer knows any part of the character or knows any character which shares the same component. Students can quickly locate characters while also better remembering the relations between characters.

This site is based almost entirely on traditional etymologies, which themselves are based primarily on the "seal" characters from about 2,200 years ago. In the last century far older characters have been uncovered, allowing modern researchers to go beyond the traditional etymologies and obtain a better understanding of the true history of Chinese characters. As this research is systematized and made available on the web, I will link the character entries into the relevant research for each character. I also hope to link the entries directly into web versions of traditional Chinese sources on etymology. For now almost every character entry includes page references to various printed reference sources on traditional etymology.

Since English understandably does not have a specific word for character etymology relative to regular word etymology, some readers not familiar with Chinese terminology might confuse the two. This site deals only with character etymologies. Characters form the basic unit of meaning in Chinese, but not all characters can stand alone as a word and most Chinese words are formed of two separate characters. For instance "zhongwen", meaning the Chinese language, has two characters as explained above. The etymologies of these words are usually quite obvious as long as the individual characters are known - a feature of Chinese which is probably its greatest strength and cannot be adequately duplicated in a simple phonetic writing system. This website does not discuss these word etymologies but rather helps students understand the less transparent character etymologies which are the object of most traditional research on Chinese etymology.

This site receives several thousand unique visitors a day. Thanks! It has been selected as site of the week from Search HongKong and site of the day from Inside China, featured at Chinese Language Information Page, ranked as a "cool site" by the World's Coolest Websites, Yahoo, and YamWeb, included in the Council of East Asian Libraries list of CEAL SuperSites, and ranked as "essential" by the Internet Guide for Chinese Studies.

Copyright 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 by Rick Harbaugh

I offer no guarantee, express or implied, regarding the accuracy of the information on this site.