The most complicated Chinese character: how many strokes and what it means

October 9, 2026 · 5 min read

The most complicated Chinese character that you can actually come across in real life is usually said to be biáng, from the name of a noodle dish, biángbiángmiàn (biangbiang noodles), from Shaanxi province. Its traditional form has about 58 strokes, the simplified one about 42. People count it differently, so sources disagree by a stroke or two.

Yet you won't find it in dictionaries of common characters: it's a local word from noodle-shop signs. For a long time computer fonts didn't have it at all. It was added to the Unicode standard only recently, and it still doesn't display on many devices. That's why we don't print it here but describe it in words.

The biang character: what it's made of

Take biáng apart, and there's nothing scary left. It's built entirely from parts you'll meet in perfectly ordinary characters:

• On top: "cave" 穴, covering everything else like a roof.
• In the middle: "to speak" 言, with a "thread" 幺 on each side.
• Below that: "horse" 馬, with a "long" 長 on each side.
• At the edges: "moon" 月 on the left, "knife" 刂 on the right.
• At the bottom: "heart" 心.
• Along the left and the bottom, the "walk" radical 辶 wraps around all of it.

In the simplified form, "horse", "long" and "speak" are replaced with their short versions, 马, 长 and 讠, which accounts for the difference of a dozen and a half strokes. To keep track, people in China remember the character with a rhyme that lists its parts in order. There are various stories about where the character came from, and none of them is confirmed.

Other hard Chinese characters

Biang has rivals. These three are in ordinary system fonts, so you can most likely see them. Stroke counts are for the traditional forms.

The first two are dictionary curiosities: you'll hardly ever see them in real text. The third used to be an ordinary word, but simplified writing replaced it with 郁: eight strokes instead of twenty-nine. That happened to many bulky characters. The same "dragon" in simplified form is 龙 lóng — dragon, just five strokes.

The Chinese character with the most strokes

If you're after not the best-known but simply the most stroke-heavy character, biang loses. Old dictionaries list a character made of four "dragons" 龍, two by two: it has 64 strokes, it's read zhé and it means "verbose". Fonts usually don't have it either, so we don't show it as a symbol.

Characters like these are museum pieces. Nobody writes with them, and the title of "the most complicated Chinese character in the world" depends on which dictionary you take and what you count as a real character. For learning, it changes nothing: there are no such characters in the HSK exam lists.

It also helps to keep scale in mind. Most everyday characters have around ten strokes, and ones with more than twenty are rare even in texts for adults. That's what simplified writing was introduced for, the script taught in mainland China and the one you see in the course: frequent bulky characters became noticeably shorter. Traditional forms remain in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and almost all the stroke-count "records" come from them.

The hardest characters you will actually meet

It's far more useful to look at characters from the course syllabus and everyday speech. They have 14 to 21 strokes, and each one breaks down into familiar parts. Tap the sound icon to hear the word.

• 赢yíngto win17 strokes: 亡 on top, 口 under it, and 月, 贝 and 凡 in a row at the bottom
• 藏cángto hide17 strokes: the "grass" radical 艹 on top, under it 臧, which gives the reading
• 嘴zuǐmouth16 strokes: the "mouth" radical 口 on the left, 此 over 角 "horn" on the right
• 懒lǎnlazy16 strokes: the "heart" radical 忄 on the left, 赖 on the right, a hint to the reading
• 擦cāto wipe17 strokes: the "hand" radical 扌 on the left, 察 on the right, as in the word for police officer
• 警察jǐngchápolice officer警 has 19 strokes: 敬 "to respect" on top, 言 "speech" below
• 鼻子bízinose鼻 has 14 strokes: 自 on top, 田 "field" in the middle, a three-stroke stand at the bottom
• 餐厅cāntīngrestaurant餐 has 16 strokes: the whole lower half is 食 "food"
• 露lùto reveal, to show; dew21 strokes: "rain" 雨 on top, "road" 路 below, which is read the same way

Notice that almost every time, one part hints at the meaning and another at the reading. The "heart" in "lazy", the "hand" in "to wipe", the "grass" in "to hide": these are radicals. How they work and which ones are the most common is explained in the article on Chinese radicals.

Notice, too, how parts travel from character to character. The right half of "to wipe" is the second syllable of "police officer". The lower half of the character in "restaurant" is "food", which in squeezed form sits on the left of 饭 fàn — meal, food. The more words you know, the less often a new complex character is truly new.

The simplest Chinese character

The simplest character is 一, "one": a single horizontal stroke. Next come characters of two or three strokes, and all of them are from the first lessons.

• 一yīone1 stroke
• 二èrtwo2 strokes
• 三sānthree3 strokes
• 人rénperson2 strokes
• 十shíten2 strokes
• 口kǒumeasure word for family members; a mouthful3 strokes; as a radical it means "mouth"

The main idea is this: a complex character is several simple ones put together. 口 kǒu, with its three strokes, sits on the left of the character for "mouth" and inside the character for "to win". 月 yuè — moon, month is in both "to win" and biang. Even the 58-stroke record holder is about ten parts, and you'll learn each of them separately at beginner level.

How not to be afraid of complex characters

• Look at parts, not strokes. Seventeen strokes are hard to remember; three or four familiar parts are easy. When you meet a new character, first find what you already know in it.
• Write in the right order. Top to bottom, left to right, part by part: then your hand remembers the character on its own, and the parts don't swap places. The rules are in the article how to write Chinese characters.
• Write it out by hand a few times. A complex character written five or six times stops being a blur of little lines.
• Don't start with the record holders. Learn characters in the order the syllabus gives them: most of the characters in the HSK 1 words are simple, and their parts later combine into complex ones.

And if characters like these make the language seem impossible, read how hard Chinese really is to learn: the writing system is not the hardest part.