Stroke number plays an important role in Chinese character sorting, teaching and computer information processing.
On the same stroke, the tip of the pen can only move along a path once, not allowed to go back.
Strokes "㇐" (heng, 横) and "㇀" (ti, 提) are written from left to right, and strokes "㇑" (shu, 竖), "㇓" (pie, 撇), "㇔" (dian, 点) and "㇏" (na, 捺) are written from top to bottom.
Some characters or components have the same shape in the China Mainland and Taiwan, but the numbers of strokes are different, such as "之 (Mainland China: ㇔㇇㇏, 3 strokes), 之 (Taiwan: ㇔㇀㇓㇏ 4)", "阝 (M: ㇌㇑, 2), 阝 (T: ㇇㇢㇑, 3)”.
[11] The following statistic data comes from an experiment conducted on all the 16,339 traditional and simplified characters of Cihai (辞海; 辭海, 1979).
The Unicode Basic CJK Unified Ideographs is an international standard character set issued by ISO and Unicode, the same character set of the Chinese national standard 13000.1.
For example, for the purpose of Chinese teaching and reference book compilation, the categories are usually relatively small; from the perspective of calligraphy art and glyph design, there are much more.
[16] Current national standards such as "Stroke Orders of Commonly-used Standard Chinese Characters" and many reference books published in China mainland have adopted the five categories of and stipulate the heng-shu-pie-dian-zhe order.