Han character comparison tool

What are CJK characters?

CJK stands for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. All of these languages have incorporated Chinese characters into their writing systems. They are called Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese and Hanja in Korean. They display some characters slightly differently.

Historically, this has also included Vietnamese, which is why they are sometimes referred to as “CJKV” characters.

What is Han Unification?

Han unification is the process by which Unicode mapped Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese (CJK) characters into a single set of unified characters. It was controversial, in part because it merged characters that were displayed slightly differently in each language, so that they had to share the same code point.

The resulting character set is sometimes called “Unihan”. For a computer to decide which regional version of a character to display, it has to rely on clues from the environment, such as the device’s region settings and the language of the page content.

This is why we have this tool, so you can compare them at a glance.