It all depends on how narrow you make your search. Finding the most complex Chinese character is actually very similar to trying to find the longest word in English. So as you can see, the question is actually a bit more difficult to answer than I thought, because there are really quite a few ways you can look at this. The most complex modern Chinese character, used in Chinese today, found in standard Chinese dictionaries, which is at least somewhat frequent thus probably has to be nàng with 36 strokes: The problem with this character however is, that the word biáng and the character itself is dialectal and cannot be found in standard Chinese dictionaries and since the 84 stroke Japanese character didn’t count because of this either, this one probably shouldn’t count as well. This character contains a total of 58 strokes and with 11 different elements is much more complex than the previous two characters I showed you. It is pronounced biáng and it is the name of a type of noodles from the Shaanxi province called biáng biáng miàn. Maybe some of you have seen this character: The problem with the two above characters is that according to some sources they fell out of use around the 5th century CE, are thus very rare today and even though they contain a large number of strokes, they are not very complex, because they are both only made up of one element repeated 4 times. This character means ‘to talk a lot, to chatter away’ and is pronounced zhé: Both following characters consist of 64 strokes. When looking for the Chinese character with the greatest number of strokes used in Chinese, we actually have a tie. This is however a character which exists only in Japanese and since we are talking about Chinese characters this one, in my opinion, shouldn’t count either. Its meaning is ‘the appearance of a dragon in flight'. The most complex real character on the other hand, a character that was not invented for fun and with real historical usage, would probably have to be taito, with 84 strokes: The only reference to it I was able to find was on the Uncyclopedia website, which is a website where you can: “Discover, share and add your best comedic writing!” So dhō is thus very probably just a recently invented character invented for fun, where the author took several very complicated existing and non-existing characters, added them together, added a few non-standard strokes, called the character dhō and gave it the meaning I mentioned earlier. It supposedly means “Impossibly complex pictogram-based writing system that takes a person a thousand thousand years to learn.” This character however should not count in my opinion for a number of reasons. When it comes to the character with the greatest number of strokes and the greatest number of elements I was able to find, it is this character, which is pronounced dhō, with 341 strokes: What is the most complex Chinese character?
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