xiangxing

The term "xiangxing" refers to pictographs in Chinese writing, where characters were originally simple pictures representing objects. For example, the character for "field" depicted a divided square. This is one of the six traditional categories of Chinese characters.1

Chinese writing is fundamentally a logographic system, meaning each character represents a meaningful unit of the language (a morpheme) rather than a sound. This system began developing in the early 2nd millennium BCE, with early inscriptions found from the Shang dynasty (18th–12th century BCE). These early scripts, like jiaguwen found on oracle bones, already showed a highly developed system similar to its present form. Over time, to represent words that couldn't be easily pictured, the phonographic principle was adopted, where a character for one word was borrowed for another word with a similar sound. To avoid ambiguity, complex characters were developed, combining a semantic element (indicating meaning) with a phonetic element (suggesting pronunciation). This system has resulted in tens of thousands of characters, though a literate person typically knows around 4,000.123