[1] It is the current national standard for stroke-based sorting, and has been applied to the arrangement of the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表),[2] and the new versions of Xinhua Zidian[3] and Xiandai Hanyu Cidian,[4] etc.
The standard of GB stroke-based order includes two parts: (a) the sorting rules, and (b) a table with all the CJK characters of GB13000.1 Character Set sorted in standard stroke-based order.
For example, character 十(2 strokes) is before 干 (3), 沛 (7) before 泣 (8), 爱 (10) before 愛 (13).
The strokes of Chinese characters are divided into five groups: 1. heng (héng, 横, horizontal; this group include primary stroke ㇐ and secondary stroke ㇀), 2. shu (shù, 竖, vertical, including primary 丨 and secondary 亅), 3. pie (piě, 撇, left falling, only stroke 丿, no secondary), 4. dian (diǎn, 点, dot, including primary 丶 and secondary ㇏), and 5. zhe (乛, fold, including primary 乛, and secondary ㇕, ㇅, ㇎, ㇡, ㇋, ㇊, ㇍, ㇈, ㇆, ㇌, ㇗, ㇞, ㇉, ㇙, ㇄, ㇟, ㇜, ㇛, ㇁, ㇢, ㇂, etc.).
According to the heng-shu-pie-dian-zhe order, heng is before shu, hence character 二 is before 十.
Similarly, we have: 十 before 厂, 乃 before 又, and 义 before 叉.
In Mainland China, there are two currently effective standards for stroke orders.
For example, 子 is before 孑, 干 before 于, and 夕 before 久.
When the number of turning points are the same, then sort according to the heng-shu-pie-dian order of the starting segments of the two zhe strokes.
The combinational relationships of strokes are divided into separation, connection and intersection.
For example: 旼 is before 旻, 嚻 is before 囂, and 旮 is before 旭.
Stroke order is in numerical form of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 representing the five groups of heng, shu, pie, dian and zhe respectively.
GB13000.1 Character Set Chinese Character Order (Stroke-Based Order) has greatly improved the accuracy of stroke-based ordering by adding more layers of sorting rules, making it possible to sort large character set with high accuracy without support from other sorting methods.
But the involvement of many layers (or tiers) of rules and comparisons make word lookup very time-consuming.
Or at most use two tiers for accurate sorting, while making sure that the user can look up a character or word conveniently with the first layer only.