Chinese character orders

Chinese character order, or Chinese character indexing, Chinese character collation and Chinese character sorting (simplified Chinese: 汉字排序; traditional Chinese: 漢字排序; pinyin: hànzì páixù), is the way in which a Chinese character set is sorted into a sequence for the convenience of information retrieval. It may also refer to the sequence so produced.

English dictionaries and indexes are normally arranged in alphabetical order for quick lookup, but Chinese is written in tens of thousands of different characters, not just dozens of letters in an alphabet, and that makes the sorting job much more challenging.

The orders or sorting methods of Chinese dictionaries are traditionally divided into three categories:

Form-based orders, including stroke-based orders and component-based orders, which further includes radical-based orders, etc.

Sound-based orders, including Pinyin-based order and Bopomofo-based order

Meaning-based orders

In modern Chinese, people also use frequency orders, where words or characters are sorted by their frequencies of use in a text corpus. There is also computer-based sorting and lookup.

Chinese dictionaries include character dictionaries (Chinese: 字典; pinyin: zìdiǎn) and word dictionaries (simplified Chinese: 词典; traditional Chinese: 詞典; pinyin: cídiǎn). Chinese word orders are based on character orders. Single-character words are arranged by character sorting directly, and multi-character words can be sorted character by character in a similar way.

In the following sections, there is a general introduction to the orders and sorting methods currently in use, focused on those which are more popular and effective.