The Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts share a common background. In the process called Han unification the common (shared) characters were identified, and named "CJK Unified Ideographs". Unicode defines a total of 74,617 CJK Unified Ideographs.
The terms ideographs or ideograms may be misleading, since the Chinese script is not strictly a picture writing system.
Historically, the Vietnamese writing system Chữ Nôm uses Chinese ideographs too, so sometimes the abbreviation "CJKV" is used. This system was replaced by an extended Latin alphabet beginning in the 1920s and is now almost entirely obsolete.
Famous quotes containing the word unified:
“Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the free play of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)