Jiu zixing

Jiu zixing (simplified Chinese: 旧字形; traditional Chinese: 舊字形; pinyin: jiù zìxíng; Wade–Giles: chiu⁴ tzŭ⁴hsing²; Jyutping: gau6 zi6jing4; lit. 'Old character form'), also known as inherited glyphs form (Chinese: 传承字形; simplified Chinese: 传承字形; traditional Chinese: 傳承字形; pinyin: chuánchéng zìxíng; Jyutping: cyun4sing4 zi6jing4), or traditional glyph form (Chinese: 传统字形; simplified Chinese: 传统字形; traditional Chinese: 傳統字形; pinyin: chuántǒng zìxíng; Jyutping: cyun4tung2 zi6jing4, not to be confused with Traditional Chinese), is a traditional printing orthography form of Chinese character which uses the orthodox forms, mainly referring to the traditional Chinese character glyphs, especially the printed forms after movable type printing. Jiu zixing was formed in the Ming Dynasty, and is also known as Kyūjitai in Japan. It also refers to the characters used in China before the Chinese writing reform and the issuing of the 1964 List of Character Forms of Common Chinese characters for Publishing.

Broadly speaking, jiu zixing also refers to the character forms used in printing Chinese before reformation by national stardardization, e.g. xin zixing (Chinese: 新字形; pinyin: xīn zìxíng; Jyutping: san1 zi6jing4; lit. 'New character form') in mainland China, Standard Form of National Characters in Taiwan, and List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters in Hong Kong. Jiu zixing is generally the opposite form of the standards. The representative books that used jiu zixing include Kangxi Dictionary, Zhongwen Da Cidian, Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, Chinese-Korean Dictionary, and Zhonghua Da Zidian.

There are several standards of jiu zixing developed by scholars before, but there is no single enforced standard. Variations of jiu zixing standard can be seen in Kangxi Dictionary, Old Chinese printing form, Korean Hanja, some printing forms in Taiwan, and MingLiU in Windows 98 and earlier versions; slight differences may occur between different jiu zixing standards. Currently there are also open-sourced communities that develop and maintain modern jiu zixing standards that are based on and/or unify other jiu zixing forms from academic research.