glossary.html

---
layout: default
title: Glossary
name: glossary.html
---

<div class="page-header">
  <h1>Glossary</h1>
</div>

<p>
  Various terminology crops up repeatedly when documenting KanjiVG,
  some of it quite specialised. This page gathers brief definitions of
  important terms so that repetition of explanation can be avoided.
</p>


<!-- Alphabetical order -->

<!-- ids currently go on the h2 element, and are lower case, hyphen
     separated. -->

<h2 id="cjk-radicals-supplement">CJK Radicals Supplement</h2>

<p>
  A block of Unicode from U+2E80 to U+2EF3 containing
  the <a href="#variant-radical">variant forms of kanji
  radicals</a>. See <a href="radicals.html">Radicals in KanjiVG</a>.
</p>

<h2 id="cjk-strokes">CJK Strokes</h2>

<p>
  A block of Unicode from U+31C0 to U+31E3 containing the shapes of
  individual kanji strokes.  The names of the strokes, such as D or
  HZ, are the initials of Chinese descriptive names. See

  <a href="stroke-types.html">Stroke types in KanjiVG</a>

  for how they are used by KanjiVG. See

  <a href="ref.html#cjk-strokes">the Unicode documentation</a>

  for more information about these.
</p>

<h2 id="cjk-unified-ideographs">CJK Unified Ideographs</h2>

<p>
  A block of Unicode containing kanji. The basic block goes from
  U+4E00 to U+9FFF, but it was extended with CJK Unified Ideographs
  Extension A from U+3400 to U+4DBF, and other extensions.
</p>
<p>
  Since the exact block of Unicode that a kanji belongs to is not
  vitally important to KanjiVG, in this documentation we refer to all
  of these blocks as the "CJK Unified Ideographs". However, we do
  distinguish these from the <a href="#kangxi-radicals-block">Kangxi
  Radicals block</a> or the <a href="#cjk-strokes">CJK Strokes</a>
  block.
</p>

<h2 id="element">Element</h2>

<p>
  Generic groupings of strokes of kanji into meaningful parts are
  referred to as "elements" in this documentation. The
  word <a href="#radical">radical</a> is reserved to mean the
  identifier of the kanji under a classification system such as
  the <a href="#kangxi-radicals">Kangxi radical</a> system.
</p>

<h2 id="han-unification">Han Unification</h2>

<p>
  Part of the original effort of Unicode to fit as many characters as
  possible into sixteen bits by using the same code point for
  characters considered to be identical. These characters are often
  graphically different, thus the Japanese-style
  KanjiVG <a href="#vector-graphics">vector graphics</a> for various
  Unicode code points are not appropriate for Chinese usage.
</p>

<h2 id="jinmei">Jinmei kanji</h2>

<p>
<ruby>人名漢字<rt>じんめいかんじ</rt></ruby> An extension of
the <a href="#joyo-kanji">Joyo Kanji</a> for people's
names. See <a href="variants.html">variants</a>.
</p>

<h2 id="jis-levels">JIS Level One and Two</h2>

<p>
  <ruby>第1・第2水準漢字<rt>だいいち・だいにすいじゅんかんじ</rt></ruby>

  Two sets of kanji which were used as the basis for the coverage of
  KanjiVG. See <a href="files.html#coverage">Coverage in KanjiVG
  files</a>. All of the 2,000 <a href="#joyo-kanji">Joyo Kanji</a>,
  and most of the <a href="#jinmei">Jinmei Kanji</a> are in level one,
  and a further 3,000 or so characters are in level two, making around
  6,000 kanji.
</p>

<p>
  This is the kanji part of the JIS X 0208 standard.  These sets were
  the standard sets of kanji available on Japanese-language computing
  platforms before the advent of Unicode.
</p>
<p>
  There are further levels three and four, but KanjiVG does not cover
  them.
</p>

<h2 id="jis-radicals">JIS radicals</h2>

<p>
  Radicals used by <a href="ref.html#jis-jiten-ref">JIS Kanji Jiten</a>
  where these differ from the radicals. This value was added to deal
  with inconsistencies between KanjiVG and Kanjidic and other
  references.
</p>

<h2 id="joyo-kanji">Joyo Kanji</h2>

<p>
  A set of just over 2,000 "daily use" characters, used in education and
  publications.
</p>

<h2 id="kaisho">Kaisho</h2>

<p>
  The <a href="#schoolbook-fonts">schoolbook fonts</a> are based on a
  style of Japanese writing known as kaisho

  (<ruby>楷書<rt>かいしょ</rt></ruby>).

  This is a non-cursive form of handwriting where each stroke is
  written separately.
</p>

<h2 id="kangxi-radicals">Kangxi radicals</h2>

<p>
  The historical <a href="#radical">radical</a> system of an old
  Chinese dictionary. These radicals are labelled <code>general</code>
  or <code>tradit</code> in KanjiVG, in contrast with
  the <a href="#nelson-radicals">Nelson radicals</a>.
</p>

<h2 id="kangxi-radicals-block">Kangxi Radicals Block</h2>

<p>
  A block of Unicode from U+2F00 to U+2FD5 containing the canonical
  form of the 214 <a href="#kangxi-radicals">Kangxi radicals</a>. Characters
  from this block are not used by KanjiVG.
</p>

<h2 id="kanji">Kanji</h2>

<p>
  For brevity's sake, the KanjiVG documentation uses the
  word <i>kanji</i> to indicate sinographs, Chinese characters, hanzi,
  and so forth. We sometimes use the term "Chinese characters" when
  referring specifically to characters used in China rather than in
  Japan.
</p>


<h2 id="nelson-radicals">Nelson radicals</h2>

<p>
  The altered radicals used in the <a href="ref.html#nelson">Nelson
    kanji dictionary</a>. Nelson used a more systematic approach to
    recategorise kanji into radicals, resulting in different values
    than the <a href="#kangxi-radicals">Kangxi radical</a> system.
    This was also copied into <a href="ref.html#kanjidic">the Kanjidic
    online kanji dictionary</a>.
</p>

<figure>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
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</td>
<td>
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</td>
<td>
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</td>
</tr>
</table>
<figcaption>
Examples of Nelson radicals in orange versus traditional (Kangxi)
radicals in red for 芻, 甦 and 緜
</figcaption>
</figure>


<h2 id="radical">Radicals</h2>

<p>
  In the KanjiVG documentation and files, "radical" is used as a
  translation of the Japanese term <ruby>部首<rt>ぶしゅ</rt></ruby>,
  which essentially means the <a href="#kangxi-radicals">Kangxi
  radical</a> of the kanji, a group of strokes which can be used to
  categorise the letter.
</p>

<p>
  Some people also refer to the various other component parts of a
  kanji as "radicals", but KanjiVG reserves the word radical for a
  single identifier under a classification scheme, and uses the word
  "element" for the component parts of a kanji other than the
  radicals.
</p>

<h2 id="schoolbook-fonts">Schoolbook fonts</h2>

<p>
  Japanese "schoolbook fonts"

  (<ruby>教科書体<rt>きょうかしょたい</rt></ruby>)

  are fonts designed for Japanese children's textbooks. These fonts
  are made to resemble high-quality Japanese handwriting in the style
  known as <a href="#kaisho">kaisho</a>.
</p>

<h2 id="stroke-order">Stroke order</h2>

<p>
Stroke order (<ruby>筆順<rt>ひつじゅん</rt></ruby>) is the order in
which strokes of a kanji should be written. This becomes important in
the case of cursive forms of Japanese handwriting, where the way in
which the strokes are joined up depends upon the order in which they
are written.
</p>


<h2 id="svg">SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)</h2>

<p>
  SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a web standard for
  making <a href="#vector-graphics">vector graphics</a>. KanjiVG
  extends the basic SVG format. See <a href="svg-format.html">SVG
  Format</a>.
</p>

<h2 id="variant-radical">Variant radicals</h2>

<p>
  Radicals may have more than one visual form. For example, Kangxi
  radical 61, "water", may take a non-variant form 水, or it may take
  a variant form 氵.  
</p>

<h2 id="vector-graphics">Vector graphics</h2>

<p>
  Vector graphics is a type of computer graphic where the image is
  defined mathematically as a collection of graphical objects like
  curves and lines, rather than as a collection of pixel values, like
  the PNG or JPEG formats. Vector graphics have the advantage over
  pixel graphics that they can be scaled to any size without becoming
  blocky, and that the file size of vector graphics is often much
  smaller than an equivalent pixel format. They have the disadvantage
  that they can be difficult to create and edit, and they are not
  useful for storing some kinds of images, for example, photographic
  images.
</p>