Un sinograma o carácter han (chino tradicional: 漢字, chino simplificado: 汉字, pinyin: hànzì) es un logograma originario de China. Los sinogramas eran utilizados antiguamente por las naciones de Asia del Este para escribir textos en chino clásico, y posteriormente lo han sido en la escritura china y la japonesa, así como en la coreana, en la vietnamita y en . Como los caracteres chinos (hanzi), los sinogramas son morfosilábicos: cada uno corresponde a una sílaba pronunciada y aporta un significado elemental. Aunque las hay de uno, la mayoría de las palabras se escriben con dos o más sinogramas (por tanto son bi- o polisilábicas), y tienen un significado distinto a la suma de los sinogramas que la componen. Los cognados entre dialectos chinos tienen las misma escritura (el mismo sinograma) y significados similares pero suelen tener pronunciaciones diferentes. Como los caracteres japoneses (kanji), los sinogramas se comportan como lexemas y la gramática se complementa con los silabarios japoneses. En japonés un sinograma puede representar varias sílabas. De otros idiomas nacionales, destaca el coreano (hanja), que los ha sustituido por el alfabeto coreano pero los sigue utilizando para desambiguar palabras homófonas, y el vietnamita (hán tự) que los ha sustituido completamente por el alfabeto vietnamita: letras latinas con diacríticos. En estos casos los sinogramas pueden representar solo el significado pero la pronunciación del idioma local, o a la vez significado y pronunciación en palabras tomadas del chino. Las pronunciaciones extranjeras de caracteres chinos se conocen como sinoxénicas.

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(Unless otherwise specified, Chinese text in this article is written in the format (Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese; Pinyin). If the Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters are identical, they are written only once.)(For the species of moth known as "Chinese Character", see Cilix glaucata.)\nChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, and sometimes also in English, they are called hànzì (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字). They have been adapted to write a number of other languages including: Japanese, where they are known as kanji, Korean, where they are known as hanja, and Vietnamese in a system known as chữ Nôm. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. In English, they are sometimes called Han characters. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the Jōyō kanji); hundreds more are in everyday use (note that the characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects). There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; the corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a limited extent in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are written in post-WWII Japan-specific simplified forms (shinjitai), which are closer to traditional forms than Chinese simplifications, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms (kyūjitai), which are virtually identical to Chinese traditional forms. In South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Teaching of Chinese characters in South Korea starts in the 7th grade and continues until the 12th grade where 1,800 total characters are taught albeit these characters are only used in certain cases (on signs, academic papers, historical writings, etc.) and are slowly declining in use. In Old Chinese (and Classical Chinese, which is based on it), most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese (esp. Mandarin Chinese), characters do not necessarily correspond to words; indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters due to the merging and loss of sounds in the Chinese language over time. Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme.However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes (written with two characters), bimorphemic syllables (written with two characters) and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase. Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations. In , most significantly today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independent of the Chinese pronunciation, and as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations, and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

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