The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background. In the process called Han unification the common (shared) characters were identified, and named "CJK Unified Ideographs". Unicode defines a total of 74,617 CJK Unified Ideographs.
The terms ideographs or ideograms may be misleading, since the Chinese script is not strictly a picture writing system.
Historically, the Vietnamese writing system Chữ Nôm uses Chinese ideographs too, so sometimes the abbreviation "CJKV" is used. This system was replaced by an extended Latin alphabet beginning in the 1920s and is now almost entirely obsolete.
Famous quotes containing the word unified:
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)