Category:Han characters by formation type

English Wikipedia has an article on:

Chinese character classification

Wikipedia

Traditional “6 principles” of character formation: 六書／六书 (liùshū, “six writings”) Japanese: rikusho.

Of these, 4 pertain to character formation, while the remaining 2 (假借 (jiǎjiè, “borrowing; making use of”) and 轉注 (zhuǎn zhù, “reciprocal meaning”)) refer to semantic change (change in meaning) – respectively, to the use of an existing character to write words with similar pronunciation, or to cognates (divergent words with a common root) sharing similar descendant characters.

Currently only the 5 formation types exist as categories.

The template Template:Han compound is used in relation to this on Wiktionary.

References[edit]

• Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字/说文解字) is a standard reference (early 2nd century CE), and is valuable, but inaccurate at points