Oct

2009

Crazy kanji: what’s the highest stroke count?

Sooner or later every Japanese learner asks the question, which kanji has the highest stroke count?

Well, today I’m going to hopefully answer that question for everyone once and for all.

As a disclaimer, I’ll just say that the information in this article is largely based on what I found on the following two Japanese pages. I did however do some research of my own at the Nagoya City Library and found a few more noteworthy kanji that I will add to the tale.

The most strokes

In this article I will basically follow the same format as the articles I pointed to above which provided the bulk of the information I’m using. That is: we will start by looking at the Japanese elementary school 1st year kanji with the highest stroke and work our way up year by year, level by level and eventually dictionary by dictionary until we reach the top.

Elementary school year 1

森もりもり
mori

Stroke count: 12

The 1006 kanji Japanese children learn at elementary school are strictly regulated, so all students learn all kanji in the same order. Year one starts pretty easy, the kanji for forest takes #1 with a stroke count of 12. Not so bad when you consider you’re just putting 3 tree (木きき ) characters together. Easy as pie.

Elementary school year 2

顔かおかお・曜
kao – you

Stroke count: 18 each
In year 2 things have gotten quite a bit more difficult already. This year students will have to come to terms with two kanji that require a hefty 18 strokes to pen, and they’re a quite a bit more complicated than putting three identical characters together.

Elementary school year 3

題だいだい
dai

Stroke count: 18
Another 18 stoke kanji takes the crown in the 3rd year of elementary school.

Elementary school year 4

競きおいきおい・議ぎぎ
kyou – gi

Stroke count: 20 each
4th grade ups the top count to 20 strokes, with a tie for first place.

Elementary school year 5

護まもるまもる
go/mamo.ru

Stroke count: 20
Year 5 keeps chugging along with another 20 stroke champion.

Elementary school year 6

警・臓
kei – zou

Stroke count: 19 each
Year 6 students can take a bit of a breather since they’ll only have to work with this pair of 19-strokers. But they can’t breathe for long since things are going to get harder real soon.

Secondary education level

While there are strict rules for the kanji that Japanese students learn in elementary school (教育きょういくきょういく漢字かんじかんじ – EN), in middle school and high school there is no definite progression so each school and instructor varies slightly. So, we shift our focus now to the well known 漢字かんじかんじ検定けんていけんてい (kanjikentei, often just called kanken) test. Level 4 of this test is approximately the same in difficulty as the 1st year of Japanese junior high school.

Kanjikentei level 4

鑑かんかん
kan

Stroke count: 23
A mighty debut into the realm of 20+ kanji, this is where you’ve got to make sure your thinking cap is on right. This character means “mirror” or “to look back”

Level 4 of the Kanken covers approximately 1300 characters.

Kanjikentei Level 3

顧・魔まま
ko – oni

Stroke count: 21 each
A couple steps back in stroke count though not necessarily in difficulty. Although you’ve probably only come across 顧, which means “to reflect” or “to observe“, if you’ve been studying the language for a while, 魔まま, or “demon” is one most people already know because it’s used so often in comics, on tv, etc.

Level 3 of the Kanken covers approximately 1600 characters.

Kanjikentei Level 2

艦かんかん
kan

Stroke count: 21
Keeping the same stroke count as the previous kanken level, this kanji refers to a large military ship or battleship.

Jouyou kanji

Level 2 of the kanjikentei examination marks the completion of the widely recognized Jouyou kanji, which total 1945 characters altogether. Thus, weighing in at 23 dashes of ink, 鑑かんかん is the stroke count champion within this important group.

Characters for use in names

鷹たかたか・麟
taka – rin

Stroke count: 24 each
In addition to the Jouyou Kanji, Level 2 of the kanken also requires knowledge of the 983 (until recently there were only 285) kanji officially recognized for use in names . The highest stroke counts in this group are 鷹たかたか, which means “hawk“, or the 麟 from 麒麟きりんきりん (kirin), which means “giraffe” (or a different mythical animal) and is the name of a Japanese beer brand.

Jouyou kanji (including old forms)

廳ちょうちょう
chou

Stroke count: 25
Many kanji used today are simplified versions of more difficult kanji that were used up until the end of World War II. If we include the old versions for these characters, the new leader of the Joyo kanji becomes 廳ちょうちょう. The simplified form of this character used today is 庁ちょうちょう.

Kanjikentei level semi-1

鬱うつうつ
utsu

Stroke count: 29
Moving up to the 2nd highest level of the Kanjikentei, we are now in the realm of what a highly educated adult Japanese can read (but probably not write). 鬱うつうつ is a Japanese character famous for its high stroke count and complex composition of elements. It means “depression“, which seems appropriate… it’s depressing that you have to work this hard just to write a single character.

JIS 0208 Kanji

驫・鸞
hyou – ran

Stroke count: 30
JIS 0208 (Japanese Industrial Standards) specifies 6355 kanji for “exhange of information.” This specification is the what Japanese character sets in computers are based on (more or less).

One of these characters is 驫, which is comprised of three horse characters and means–not surprisingly–many horses. Apparently there’s an unstaffed train station in Aomori prefecture where you can find this character. The station is named 驫木とどろきとどろき駅えきえき (todorokieki).

鸞 is slightly less obscure. It’s found in the name of the founder of the Joudo Shinshuu (pure land) sect of Buddhism. Shinran (親鸞しんらんしんらん)was the guy’s name.

Kanjikentei level 1

麤
so / ara.i

Stroke count: 33
Kanjikentei Level 1 is the holy grail for kanji lovers. It covers every kanji you will ever need to know and far too many more that you won’t. It also requires you to know highly obscure readings for all the kanji which you oh-so-mistakenly thought were easy (ie. Did you know that 両人りょうにんりょうにん can be read as futari?).

With a 14% success rate even among actively studying, intelligent, adult Japanese applicants, there is no higher honor of nerdiness to be bestowed than to pass this test. And the highest stroke count you’ll find here is a dazzling 33 strokes, made up of 3 characters for deer pushed together. It means “rough” and is typically simplified to just one deer character when it is actually used (it appears in some 4-character compounds).

Note: This character is included in the JIS 0212 kanji set (less widely supported than JIS 0208).

The Twilight Zone

To the best of my knowledge, the 33 stroke 麤 is the highest stroke count that can be rendered on (most) computers (it’s in the MS Gothic font with Windows XP and higher, and perhaps earlier versions too). But wouldn’t it be all too easy if kanji stopped there. No, no my friend, it does not. This is actually where the real stroke count games begin.

Once you’ve mentally prepared yourself for the carnage of ink on paper you’re about to witness, scroll over these images I’ve prepared (computer fonts as far as I know don’t include these characters and if they do the display will be unreliable) and gaze in awe at the top stroke count kanji from the major Japanese kanji dictionaries. Remember that these are each intended to be a single character only, that is… written between two lines on a sheet of paper.

Monsters, aren’t they? Okay, now it’s time to look at the big daddy of all dictionaries. The 大だいだい漢和かんわかんわ辞典じてんじてん (daikanwajiten). It spans 12 volumes (plus 2 supplements and and index book) each big enough to make the Bible look like an easy read. At the library where I checked the kanji for this post, the daikanwa took up an entire shelf. Talk about overpowering. It contains, get this… 51,109 kanji characters.

How many kanji do you learn each week at university? 10? Let’s say 20. At 20 kanji a week… you would need 50 years to learn all of these kanji. And that’s without summer vacations.

But I digress, there’s no reason to waste your life learning kanji that nobody knows when somebody has already written the dictionary for you. Let’s just look at the highlights, shall we?

So in the daikanwajiten, the mother of all kanji dictionaries, there is a tie for 1st place. How are we to resolve this dilemma?

But wait, there is another. That’s right, a kanji that’s not in the daikanwa. And for that matter, a kanji that’s not even in any historical Chinese records.

Behold….!

According to a 2002 newspaper article from Kumamoto, somebody in Japan was apparently using this as their personal name as recently as the 1960s. The kanji has been included in the most comprehensive computer-based dictionary software available (the konjyakumojikyou).

Otodo has made several appearances on Japanese variety TV shows, where Japanese ooh and aah at how “difficult” it is, but really this kanji is just a pain in the a#$. You write cloud three times and under it you write dragon three times. When you’re done your hands and eyes hurt and you’ve got what’s basically a black spot on a piece of paper.

Personally, I don’t think this is even a legitimate kanji. It was probably some guy’s idea of a joke, and because of one loser’s strange sense of humor now everyone wants to rewrite history. Kind of an anticlimax, really. But, despite its origin, it’s gained a place in history and so in a sense it has become a real kanji.

The nihonshock award for most strokes goes to…

Now I get to add my two cents on the issue. Take a look at the 84 stroke kanji again. Yeah that’s a lot of strokes, but what we’ve really just done is written cloud and dragon three times each and called it one kanji. The number of unique strokes or the number of strokes that you actually need to know in order to write the character is actually just 28 (雲くもくも = 12 + 龍りゅうりゅう = 16).

The same goes for both 64 stroke kanji from the daikanwa, and the 52 stroke from the koukanwa and the 48 stroke from the koukijiten. They’re all just pushing clouds and thunder and dragons together and calling it a character. Hogwash, I say!

I don’t know what the Japanese think but I call that cheating. So I opened up the daikanwa myself and found the character with the most unique strokes.

And the winner is….!!!

Congratulations to sei! Now that’s what I call a kanji.

However, I have to admit that even this method ended in a tie, because there was another 44 character kanji in the daikanwa which met the requirement of having entirely unique parts. A (small) round of applause for the runner up, please!

Why runner up? Well, look at it. It’s lots of strokes, but the right half is like the other disqualified kanji, just sticking easier ones together. The only difference is it’s squishing different kanji together instead of multiplying the same one. Boo! The bottom left is a triple wing (unique, but hardly difficult). Really the only trick to this kanji is remembering that top left bit.

Other people may have their opinions and research on which kanji is really #1 and I welcome all comments. There’s a lot of information in this article so I probably made some mistakes even. Let me know if you spot anything.

On a final note I just want to say that for a variety of reasons, stroke count and difficulty are not the same thing. Not even close. But since there’s no way to really measure how difficult a kanji is, I’ll probably never get around to writing that article.

Supplement

Just for kicks, here’s a short list of some words that look really hard, but which Japanese people read all the time (just don’t ask them to write it).

画数かくすうかくすうが多おおおおい漢字かんじかんじ

KANJI	MEANING
薔薇ばらばら (bara)	rose
綺麗きれいきれい (kirei)	beautiful
躊躇ちゅうちょちゅうちょ (chuucho)	hesitation
網羅もうらもうら (moura)	coverage, inclusion
就職しゅうしょくしゅうしょく (shuushoku)	job searching
痙攣けいれんけいれん (keiren)	a spasm, seizure
蝋燭ろうそくろうそく (rousoku)	a candle

51 Responses

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Japundit says:

November 19, 2009 at 8:13 pm

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Here is the link: http://www.japundit.com/Education/Crazy_kanji_whats_the_highest_stroke_count…

Comments

Thank you for this one! It was very informative and also funny!
And I agree with you, that the kanji’s with the same character multiplied didn’t deserve to win!

Very good job on putting together the sickest kanji ever!

by: Sinna, Oct 27th at 2:24 pm
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the article.

by: Lloyd Vincent, Oct 27th at 9:06 pm
So I guess in terms of shodo, sei is the most challenging? I must try it out the next time I find a calligraphy pen (not sure where mine went)

by: August, Nov 2nd at 8:01 am
btw incredibly detailed and informative article!

by: August, Nov 2nd at 8:02 am
Great post – extremely helpful and great fodder for those late-night, back of the napkin kanji-games!

by: David Baeckelandt, Nov 20th at 8:18 pm
@August not sure if sei is the most challenging or not, but might be the most work.

@David ah yes, I love those games.

by: Lloyd Vincent, Nov 20th at 8:27 pm
Just a tidbit: The second character under “The Twilight Zone” is pronounced “nang” in Chinese. (Not that I’ve ever heard anyone say it — I only noticed in the dictionary because it is so hard.)

by: MF, Nov 22nd at 12:28 am
But the 性せいせい variant is also not difficult: It’s just 靈れいれい + 覺さとしさとし (Old forms of 霊れいれい and 覚さとしさとし). For me, 鬱うつうつ is much more complicated.

by: Hellstorm, Nov 27th at 6:26 am
Wow, good find! Makes you realise that actually, having to piece together a 22 stroke kanji is child’s play in comparison to some of those beasts!

by: Ryan Taylor, Nov 28th at 2:43 am
@MF : Thanks for the tip. I wonder if the meaning is the same in Chinese?

@Hellstorm : Not many people are familiar with those old forms, though. And the article is about stroke count more than difficulty. (there’s not really a good way to judge difficulty) You’ve got a point though, 鬱うつうつ is probably harder to remember because it’s such an unusual combination of elements.

@Ryan : I eat 22 stroke kanji for breakfast! Well… lunch actually (鰻うなぎうなぎ)

by: Lloyd Vincent, Nov 29th at 2:58 am
Wow! Impressed!

by: John, Dec 13th at 9:25 pm
Great article!

According to wikipedia (without actual source) the monster kanji with 84 strokes has 2 variations,
one with the reading “taito” and another one with the readings “daito”, “otodo”.
The first has the same appearance as the one in your article and the other differs in having the first “dragon” between the “clouds”.
Both are supposed to mean “the appearance of a dragon in a flight”.

by: Bogus, Jan 7th at 3:02 pm
wow!!
just simply WOW!!!
i was going to actually get on you by saying that the highest stroke counts were just tripling and “quadripling” the same kanji together,
but BAM!!!
you wrote a unique kanji with high stroke count!!…..and a runner up.
i thoroughly enjoyed reading this article your wrote
“the twilight zone section had me rotfl…

by: dwayne2d3d, Feb 7th at 9:23 am
I’d vote for 鬱うつうつ as being the worst kanji, as it’s hardly possible to write AND in relatively common use, unlike the other ones mentioned. Ive run into it a couple of times already, it’s feels like wth is this.

by: B, Mar 3rd at 8:46 am
The Kanji for seizure will give you one if you look at it for too long and trying to write 鬱うつうつ can get you depressed. That’s another category of Kanji. Instead of depicting the meaning, they cause the meaning.

by: Rob, Jul 29th at 9:00 am
I only started learning Japanese about four months ago, so I have all these “Gee, I wonder if…” questions. You answered two of them here! One was about insane stroke counts, the other about memory. I’ve noticed that I can often recognize a kanji, but if you ask me to draw the thing, I wipe out. I was wondering if native speakers experienced the same thing, and it turns out they do!
I’ll return here, by the way. On top of the available info, I like your writing style. It’s friendly!

by: Danna, Aug 7th at 8:10 am
LOL, I was screaming as I scrolled down step by step. This was so fun hehe. Thanks

by: Kyuzo, Aug 21st at 2:41 pm
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%93%E3%83%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%93%E3%83%A3%E3%83%B3%E9%BA%BA

57 strokes, very few of them repeated!

by: Alfonse, Dec 16th at 6:56 am
Nice work, I really enjoyed your article xD
I’m doing my own Jouyou list as we speak so that I can learn them at any time, wherever

Thanks for this

by: 最高さいこうさいこう, Mar 20th at 5:45 am
Think you got the highest stroke count? Try this site: http://www.edepot.com/taocalig.html

It lists ALL displayable characters in your browser (without needing graphics).

The strokes count is amazing. Even more amazing is the number of quadruplets you can find (four of the same characters forming a complex character).

by: pl, Aug 31st at 6:54 pm
Great article! I’ve laughed harder and harder as I continued reading! What a monsters of a kanji =)) Only one thing – in the final list of common words written in rare kanji, I think some should not be there. 綺麗きれいきれい – seriously, 麗うららうらら is jouyou kanji and 綺あやぎぬあやぎぬ is not a lot different from 奇きき. In 網羅もうらもうら – both kanji are in jouyou list. And 就職しゅうしょくしゅうしょく? Really? Come on, these are not just jouyou, they are both learned in elementary school!

by: Orange Hollow, Sep 2nd at 4:12 pm
so desu ne..
[img]http://i.imgur.com/lPlkW.jpg[/img]

by: kyogokudo, Sep 20th at 3:45 am
Excuse me, my good sir, but I think there’s a mistake in the article. The very often used word “oni” for demon is 鬼おにおに. 　魔まま also means demonry or witchcraft, but it is pronounced “ma”. Every Final Fantasy player can tell you that : 魔法まほうまほう “mahou” = magic. (;

by: Sébastien, Sep 28th at 2:44 pm
wow

by: leanna, Nov 9th at 3:30 pm
Hah! Gotta love those 50+ kanji. I learnt a few hundred kanji while in Japan but nothing of this magnitude and all but forgotten now!
Maybe I’ll make it my new mission to learn how to write one of these
Anyway, thanks for the interesting article.

by: Oliver, Apr 15th at 3:48 am
I love languages and just started Rosetta Stone. I pretty much can sound out anything in hiragana or katakana, though I don’t have a clue what I’m saying. This article on kanji has me scared.

by: Gwen, Jul 30th at 5:01 am
Just a question. The image at the top of the article, in the second row, there’s a kanji with three squares at the bottom of the character. I’m curious to know what it is.

Well executed article by the way.

by: Paul, Sep 24th at 8:12 pm
@Paul: Hey, sorry but that picture was part of the index of the 大だいだい漢和かんわかんわ辞典じてんじてん. I’d need to go back to the library to check it, but unfortunately I left Japan a year ago.

by: Lloyd Vincent, Sep 26th at 1:21 am
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not sure the character 鑑かんかん can mean “mirror”. To my knowledge “mirror” is 鏡かがみきょう (かがみ) whereas 鑑かんかん’s kun-yomi is かんがみ. The reading is super similar so easy to mistake maybe? Again, correct me if I’m wrong cause I’m curious…

by: ボビー, Nov 2nd at 9:57 pm
To ボビー: It can be read as かがみ, but it means mirror or pattern. When you have two characters listed as having the same kun’yomi, you might as well assume that there is some difference in meaning, nuance, or frequency. In this case the two words have close etymology: かがみ & かんがみる

The latter is simply the verb for of かがみ. The ん is just an example of 撥音はつおんはつおん化かか.

The difference between 鏡かがみきょう and 鑑かんかん is almost like the difference between 直じきなおる and 治ちなおる. Same source but different nuances almost certainly means different spellings.

by: Seth, Dec 20th at 1:55 pm
those are HUGE kangi
ｶｸｲﾝﾁｽｲｲｾﾆｿ:translation: those are epic

by: lachyb2000, Jun 5th at 8:26 am
Any idea on what the biggest Kanji is- the one that if the lines are one pixel wide with separation of 1 pixel are still recogniseable?
Stroke Count is not a great measure as a stroke can be anything from a tiny mark to an encapsulating field.

by: Michael, Jun 5th at 2:43 pm
I was just on Spoon & Tamago’s Facebook site, and they purport that the kanji for “bonnou” (they have a picture replete with 108 strokes) [This kanji has 108 strokes and is read “bonnou.” […”In Buddhist teaching there are 108 human desires and it was thought that you could cleanse yourself from them by writing this kanji…]

Any idea?

by: Joe, Jun 12th at 5:17 pm
麤

by: 麤, Jul 19th at 1:04 am
Im just learning Japanese, and thought I had done well to learn both Hiragana and katakana – but kanji looks impossible. I really wish those Japanese women who came up with Hiragana convinced someone to ditch kanji a long time ago Its soooo much easier.

by: Tim O'Connor, Feb 5th at 8:36 pm
I guess I’ve made a ton of progress studying kanji, because none of those look that complicated. I would hate to have to write those out though.

by: James C., Feb 13th at 8:19 pm
>>computer fonts as far as I know don’t include these characters
Mine does! Here there be dragons!

by: Hisao, Mar 15th at 11:40 am
Damn! You’re gimpy forum code won’t let me actually post these!

by: Hisao, Mar 15th at 11:47 am
OK. Here are the unicode code points anyway.
U+2A68A – 35 Strokes
U+9F49 – 36 Strokes
U+291D3 – 40 Strokes
U+9F98 – 48 Strokes
U+4A3B – 52 Strokes
U+2A6A5 – 64 Strokes
U+2053B – 64 Strokes
U+278B1 – 44 Strokes
U+29663 – 46!! Strokes
That’s all of them except otodo. I wonder how long it will take before someone adds

it. >;-) Biang is supposed to be in next version. 57 strokes!

I found a few more monsters while I was at it.
U+29664 – 48 Strokes
U+269C4 – 42 Strokes
U+2A4CA – 41 Strokes
U+2A68E – 40 Strokes

by: Hisao, Mar 15th at 11:55 am
I know this is probably an older article, and it was funny, but I have to call bs on some of these seeing as how they dont have any meanings, Japanese people dont even know how to read them.

by: spencer, Mar 19th at 4:06 pm
34 stroke one, PC Can render it.

by: 䯂, Mar 30th at 6:44 am
Tiato means the view od dragom in fight

by: Nyk, Jun 14th at 12:20 am
鬱うつうつ is actually very easy to write. One of the easiest kanji to remember how to write from memory for me because it’s so unique. I learned it instantly, to be honest. High stroke count doesn’t mean much when all the radicals are quite common.

by: 鬱うつうつ, Jun 28th at 9:41 am
the 84-stroke character is not chinese-born. originally made in japan. so it doesn’t have chinese pronunciation. otodo, taito are japanese family names. that’s not correct.

by: 静岡しずおかしずおか県民けんみんけんみん, Sep 5th at 6:17 pm
Well, actually they look rather interesting. Not that I’ve seen them before but I would love to break them down and speculate why they used such radicals. Anyway, a lot of these types of kanji aren’t really used that often.

by: Beakmen, Dec 7th at 4:04 pm
Actually 魔まま isn’t read as ‘oni,’ but ‘ma.’ Its etymology is as follows: phonetic 麻あさあさ(ma) + semantic 鬼おにおに(demon)

by: Kanjikentei Level 3, Apr 4th at 10:15 am
Nice list. By the way, 鬱うつうつ is now a Jouyou Kanji. It was added with the batch they added a few years ago (there are 2136 now)

I’ve been surprised by how many rare Kanji I’ve been running into playing visual novel games. I recall seeing 驫, but don’t remember what the context was. No idea why, but it seems like manga has a lot more kana (or at least furigana), while visual novels can be pretty unforgiving when it comes to Kanji.

by: Rand, May 2nd at 7:49 am
Awesome article!, it was really helpful and interesing

by: Laeark, Sep 9th at 4:05 am
I would have thought 鬮くじくじ for 宝たからたから鬮くじくじたからくじ would have had his place somewjeee around as the stroke here is probably most unique I’ve seen around in my opinion

http://kakijun.jp/page-ms/kuji26200.html

by: あやこ, Mar 10th at 7:58 am
See this pic from Wikipedia. Bet it’ll be the hardest character you ever see:)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Bi%C3%A1ng-order_complete.gif/440px-Bi%C3%A1ng-order_complete.gif
Of course it’s Chinese.

by: David Chen, Apr 9th at 4:28 pm