Glossary

1. Basic Component
The smallest components that are considered one unit in a Hanzi structure and are not further decomposed, such as "田" and "力" in Hanzi character "男". (See Chinese Character Component）

2. Big5
The industrial standard character set used in Taiwan and Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. It has about 13,000 characters. (See also GB, Unicode)

3. Big-endian.
A computer architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values with the most significant byte (MSB) values first. (See Also UTF-16)

4. Block
A contiguous range of code positions to which a set of characters that share some common characteristics, such as a particular script, are allocated. A block does not overlap with another block. One or more of the code positions within a block may have no character allocated to it.

5. BMP
Abbreviation for "Basic Multilingual Plane". This is the first plane in UCS-4 (Plane 00 of Group 00). It is also the main plane in the 2-Octet encoding.(See also UCS-4, UCS-2)

6. Canonical form
The form with which characters of ISO/IEC 10646 are specified using four octets/bytes to represent each character. UCS-4 is the canonical form of ISO/IEC 10646. (See also UCS-4)

7. CC-Data-Element
Stands for Coded-Character-Data-Element. An element of interchanged information that is specified to consist of a sequence of coded representations of characters, in accordance with one or more identified standards for coded character sets. For example, in some scripts, they need to use accent characters, such as the diacritical character, ""(U+ 0341) in the Latin alphabet such as used on top of the letter "" as appeared in ""(U+00E1). In this example "" is not a character in the common sense, but it is a data element which needs to be denoted in the standard. (See also Coded Character Set)

8. Cell
Normally refers to a code point. In a 2-bytes encoding, a code point is found first by locating its row number (first byte) and then the cell, which corresponds to the column number (second byte). In a 2-D matrix, cell usually represents the values along the horizontal axis. (See also Row)

9. Character
An element used to represent, organize or control an independent concept. A character usually refers to an independent writing element in a language or an independent symbol. It can be (1) an element of a computer character set; (2) an element of an alphabet; (3) an element of the Hanzi, among other things. (See also Glyph, Hanzi)

10. Character Boundary
Within a stream of octets/bytes the demarcation between the last octet/byte of the coded representation of a character and the first octet/byte of that of the next coded character.

11. Character Decomposition
The process of separating or analysing a text element into component units. These component units may not have any functional status, but may be simply formal units or abstract shapes. Chinese characters can be decomposed according to components or strokes.

12. Character Encoding Scheme
A mapping from a character set to a set of octets/bytes. (See also Character Set, Coded Character Set)

13. Character Set
A collection of elements used to organize, control, or represent information on a computer. (See Coded Character set)

14. Character Unification
The process of replacing a number of potential elements of a character set with one actual element. The criteria for unification may be according to abstract form, abstract function, or both. Unification is to avoid assigning multiple code points to some elements/characters that are basically the same.

15. Chinese Character Component
An ideograph unit with one or more strokes, which is often used as a single unit to compose a Chinese character. For example, "木, 心, 口, 也". All Chinese radicals are considered components. (See Radicals)

16. CJK Ideographs
A set of Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese universal coded Hanzi defined in the ISO/IEC 10646 standard. (See also Hanzi)

17. CJK Ideographs Unification
The ideographs in the ISO/IEC 10646 are derived from the source standards by applying a set of unification procedures. The purpose is to avoid giving multiple code points to CJK ideographs that are basically the same with slight variation in shape. Ideographs that are unrelated in historical derivation have not been unified. An association between ideographs from different sources is made here if their shapes are sufficiently similar, according to the two-level classification to differentiate (a) between abstract shapes and (b) between actual shapes determined by particular typefaces.(See Source)

18. Coded Character
A character together with its coded representation.

19. Coded Character Set
A character set in which each character is assigned a numeric code value. Frequently abbreviated as character set when the context is sufficient to determine what is intended. (See Character Set)

20. Combining Character
A member of an identified subset of the coded character set of ISO/IEC 10646 intended for combination with the preceding non-combining graphic character, or with a sequence of combining characters preceded by a non-combining character. For example, "" in ISO/IEC 10646 is defined as a combining character, it can then be used with a non-combining character "" to form the character "".

21. Compatibility Character
A graphic character included as a coded character of ISO/IEC 10646 without regards to unification primarily for compatibility with existing coded character sets to guarantee round-trip conversion. （See Also Transcoding）

22. Composite Sequence
A sequence of graphic characters consisting of a non-combining character followed by one or more combining characters. For example U+00E1 U+0341 U+0322 is a composite sequence (See also Combining Characters)

23. Glyph
Glyph refers to the actual shape of a character. A Chinese character glyph gives the geometric structure, such as strokes, components and relative positions of the strokes and components. (See also Character)

24. Graphic Character
A character, other than a control function, that has a visual representation and can be handwritten, printed, or displayed.

25. Graphic Symbol
The visual representation of a graphic character or of a composite sequence. (See also Composite Sequence, Graphic Character)

26. Group
A subdivision of the coding space in ISO/IEC 10646. There are 128 groups in ISO/IEC 10646， with each group has 256 planes of 256 rows by 256 columns, a total 256 x 256 x 256 cells in each group.

27. Guo Biao (GB)
The National standard character set of P.R. China used in Mainland China, Singapore, and other places that use Simplified Chinese characters. (See also Big5, Unicode)

28. Han Characters
Ideographic characters of Chinese origin.

29. Hanzi
The notation system of Chinese writing. Hanzi is also used by other nations and nationalites for writing notation. The term is often used with Han Characters interchangeably. (See Han Characters)

30. High-half Zone (Range: U+D800-U+DBFF)
A set of cells reserved for use in UTF-16 as the high-byte in a surrogate pair to represent characters beyond BMP range. (See also Low-half Zone,Surrogate Pair, and UTF-16)

31. Ideograph
Ideograph refers to writing systems in which the scripts are not primarily used to represent sound, but to represent meaning. Han characters are often referred to as ideographs. (See also Han Characters)

32. Interchange
The process of transferring character coded data from one user to another, using telecommunication means or interchangeable media, with no loss of data. (See also Coded Character)

33. Internetworking
The process of permitting two or more systems, each employing different coded character sets, meaningfully to interchange character coded data; conversion between the two codes may be involved. (See also Coded Character Set)

34. Little-endian
A computer architecture that stores multiple-byte numerical values with the least significant byte (LSB) values first. (See Also UTF-16)

35. Low-half Zone (Range: U+DC00-DFFF)
A set of cells reserved for use in UTF-16 as the lower-byte in a surrogate pair to represent characters beyond the BMP. (See also High-half Zone, Surrogate Pair, UTF-16)

36. Octet
An ordered sequence of eight bits considered as a single unit, also known as a Byte.

37. Pinyin
The standard way of Romanising Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China and in most other places around the world.

38. Plane
A subdivision of a group of 256 x 256 cells.

39. Presentation Form
In the presentation of some scripts, a form of a graphic symbol representing a character that depends on the position of the character relative to other characters.

40. Private Use Area
An area in BMP (from E000 to F8FF) whose content is not specified in ISO/IEC 10646 and any data defined in this range is not meant for exchange.

41. Private Use Plane
A plane in ISO/IEC 10646 whose content is not specified and any data defined in this plane is not meant for exchange.

42. Radicals
A component of a Han character (Hanzi) which is designated as the indexing unit in the dictionaries. The number of such radicals in the traditional Chinese dictionary, KangXi Dictionary, is 214. (See also Han Character, Hanzi)

43. Repertoire
A specified set of characters that are represented in a coded character set. (See also Coded Character Set)

44. Row
A subdivision of a plane of 256 cells. In a 2-D matrix, cell usually represents the values along the vertical axis. (See also Cell)

45. Source
CJK Unified Ideographs in ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 contains 20,902 ideographs. They are derived from over 54,000 ideographs that are found in various different nationals and regional coded character standards, which are referred to as the "sources".

46. Stroke
The smallest writing unit without disconnection, such as
"".

47. Stroke Count
Total number of strokes to construct a Hanzi glyph or a component.

48. Stroke Feature
Absolute shape of a stroke. It can be classified by numbers of types. The basic types include strokes of "".

49. Stroke Order
The sequence and direction of strokes when writing a Hanzi.

50. Supplementary Plane
A plane that accommodates characters which have not been allocated to the Basic Multilingual Plane. (See also BMP)

51. Surrogate pair
It is a coded character representation in UCS-2 for a single abstract character that consists of a sequence of two code units, where the first unit of the pair is in the high-half zone and the second is in the low-half zone defined in BMP only. Surrogate pairs provide a mechanism in UCS-2 to support another 16X64K number of characters by using only the code range in BMP. (See Also High-half Zone, Low-half Zone, UCS-2)

52. Transcoding
Conversion of character data between different character sets.

53. Transformation Format.
A mapping from a coded character sequence to a unique sequence of code units (typically bytes). (See Also UTF, UTF-8, UTF-16)

54. UCS-2
ISO/IEC 10646 encoding form which encoding a character in 2 octets. It's code range is U+0000 to U+FFFF (See also BMP)

55. UCS-4
ISO/IEC 10646 encoding form which encoding a character in 4 octets. It's code range is U+00000000 to U+EFFFFFFF(See also Canonical Form, BMP)

56. Unicode
Unicode standard is the implementation of ISO/IEC 10646. That is, it defines all characters in ISO/IEC 10646. In addition, it also defines the behaviour of certain characters in ISO/IEC 10646 such as displaying a composite sequence as a single symbol on the screen, and trigger cursor movement when seeing a , etc.

57. UTF
Abbreviation for "Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format".

58. UTF-8
Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format, 8-bit encoding form. UTF-8 is the Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value (code point) as a sequence of one to four bytes. (See Also Transformation Format, UTF)

59. UTF-16
Unicode (or UCS) Transformation Format, 16-bit encoding form. The UTF-16 is the Unicode Transformation Format that serializes a Unicode scalar value (code point) as a sequence of two bytes, in either big-endian or little-endian format. (See Also Big-endian, Little-endian, Transformation Format, UTF)

60. Zone
A sequence of cells of a code table, comprising one or more rows, either in whole or in part, containing characters of a particular class. (See also Cell, Row)