Character, symbol, letter,

I studied Chinese at university and we always used the term character to refer to the Chinese ‘characters’. Now I’m doing an additional year of computer science and he mentioned Chinese and referred to it as symbols. So we ended up in a discussion.
In Dutch we use the word ‘karakter’ probably because this comes from English, but why is the character used in English.
Is a Chinese character a symbol ? is it a sign ? Are all characters symbols and all symbols signs ? (but not the other way around?)
We agreed that it were not letters since there is no alphabet …
I would like to hear people opinion about that … or if somebody has a good book, revieuw, discussion, text,… on this subject I would be very interested, because I could then refer to that instead of justing saying ‘I learned it that way’, 'we always use the term character", ‘it’s just that way’ …

maybe this belongs in culture and history … but i thought it had more to do with the language so I ended up posting it here

The way I see it.

  • character is an acceptable translation for

All words and their component parts (characters, letters, radicals) are symbols of course. It seems stupid to refer to Chinese

You can’t refer to Chinese characters just as : ideographs or just pictographs. Because some are ideographs, some are pictographs and others are just made up and have no ideographic/pictographic meaning left.

The way I see it is that a zi is a sole character and a ci is a word. a ci is composed of different zi. That’s why there’s a diffence between a cidian and a zidian (a word-dictionary and a character-dictionary). And ci i would translate as ‘word’. Just like in English, ‘a’ is a letter and ‘ape’ word made from different letters (a,p,e)

As far is i know people who are busy with Chinese use the term character while people unfamiliar with Chinese use ‘symbol,sign,character,letter,…’ but where does the usage of character come from then …

I guess it’s only in your computer science class where they referred to it as symbols. ‘Character’ could be confused with a byte. A chinese character usually takes up 2 bytes, or a word. In a technical sense, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Chinese character or Prince’s squiggle, they’re all symbols. In a linguistic sense, we only call them Chinese ‘characters’, why ? umm… not sure. Maybe characters are for a form of writing, prince’s squiggle is not writing, hence not a character, or is it ?

The only thing I have ever seen them referred to as in general was “characters”, and occaisonally “bloody characters” (!)

as said above character is simply a more precise term. characters are a subset of all symbols. “character” definitely refers to written language while symbol does not necessarily. as you mention characters are generally non-alphabetic in nature, though i have heard japanese katagana referred to as characters, and they are pretty alphabetic. perhaps it is their individual rather than scripty nature that makes them characters.

“Character” might be better than “symbol,” but it’s still not a particularly precise term, esp. when thrown into the world of computers. Some sinologists prefer the term “tetragraph,” from a literal translation of fangkuaizi. Others like “sinograph” (for Hanzi).

Now I call them letters :smiley:
I look a ‘characters’ like a Chinese alphabet, makes thing not so scary. Honestly, I guess they’re kind of like words too. Maybe we should call them wordetters, but that would leave out the tetragraph, sinograph and ideagraphness. So I say we start calling them:
tetrawordetternographideas. That way we could end all confusion.


I never got there to even explain him that … because the reason why I started the discussion was in fact that he believed that, even today, Chinese make new ‘symbols’ for every new word … so I said to him that he was completely wrong and started the discussion, but he didn’t seem to be that happy with the fact that I said he was wrong … hope I can still pass my (oral) exam next wednesday :frowning:

From Dictionary.Com


  1. Something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible. See Synonyms at sign.
  2. A printed or written sign used to represent an operation, element, quantity, quality, or relation, as in mathematics or music.


  1. A mark or symbol used in a writing system.
  2. Computer Science.
    [ul]a. One of a set of symbols, such as letters or numbers, that are arranged to express information.
    b. The numerical code representing such a character. [/ul]
  3. A style of printing or writing.
  4. A symbol used in secret writing; a cipher or code.


  1. A written symbol or character representing a speech sound and being a component of an alphabet.
  2. A written symbol or character used in the graphemic representation of a word, such as the h in Thames.

I’d say a character is a symbol, but a symbol is not necessarily a character. A symbol could be a picture, like a computer icon. So, yes Chinese words are symbols. But, more precisely (as has been said) they are characters.

Letters, are also characters, though. They are just a different type of character. So, English and Chinese both used characters. In the case of English, the characters are letters and combinations of the letters form words. In the case of Chinese, the characters are pictograph/ideographs (& such) that represent words themselves. I guess the radicals could be called letters.

However, if I am correct, Chinese characters are not just made up of multiple radicals put together. There are also other non-radical strokes invovled. So, you can’t say that the radicals are an letters. They are more like the root word.

In contrast, Korean has an alphabet/letters. They don’t look like roman letters, but words are made up of a combination of these characters/letters. You won’t find a word that uses a character that is not in the alphabet.

Did that get confusing at the end? :?

Quietmountain. Although it doesn’t seem right to call Chinese ‘characters’ letters, going by the dictionary definition you could.


  1. A written symbol or character representing a speech sound and being a component of an alphabet. [/quote]

Well that rules out characters, as they don’t (usually) represent a ‘sound’, and they’re not part of an alphabet.


That fits for characters.