Editing Kanji (section)

==Total number of kanji==
There is no definitive count of kanji characters, just as there is none of Chinese characters generally. The {{translit|ja|[[Dai Kan-Wa Jiten]]}}, which is considered to be comprehensive in Japan, contains about 50,000 characters. The {{translit|cmn|[[Zhonghua Zihai]]}}, published in 1994 in China, contains about 85,000 characters, but the majority of them are not in common use in any country, and many are obscure variants or archaic forms.<ref name=taipei>Kuang-Hui Chiu, Chi-Ching Hsu (2006). [http://www.ntpu.edu.tw/ads/doc/95/paper%20hsu95.doc Chinese Dilemmas : How Many Ideographs are Needed] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717015011/http://www.ntpu.edu.tw/ads/doc/95/paper%20hsu95.doc |date=July 17, 2011 }}, National Taipei University</ref><ref>Shouhui Zhao, Dongbo Zhang, [http://www.colips.org/journals/volume17/JCLC_2007_V17_N2_04.pdf The Totality of Chinese Characters—A Digital Perspective] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160912154731/http://www.colips.org/journals/volume17/JCLC_2007_V17_N2_04.pdf |date=September 12, 2016 }}</ref><ref>Daniel G. Peebles, [http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2007-592.pdf SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160310162228/http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2007-592.pdf |date=March 10, 2016 }}, May 29, 2007</ref>

A list of 2,136 [[jōyō kanji|{{translit|ja|jōyō}} kanji]] is regarded as necessary for functional literacy in Japanese. Approximately a thousand more characters are commonly used and readily understood by the majority in Japan and a few thousand more find occasional use, particularly in specialized fields of study but those may be obscure to most out of context. A total of 13,108 characters can be encoded in various [[#Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji|Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji]].