Chinese character classification

All Chinese characters are logograms, but can be further categorised based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideograms, but the vast majority are what are often called phono-semantic compounds.

The traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularised in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded these categories. In older literature, Chinese characters may be referred to generally as "ideograms", due to a historical misconception that such characters represented ideas directly, as was long thought with Egyptian hieroglyphs—whereas some people assert that they do so only through association with the spoken word.