Use of Chinese Extension Fonts

Generally speaking, the default Chinese fonts that are already installed in your computer should be sufficient to use this website. Depending on which operating system, internet browser and installed fonts, however, you may see that some characters are not displayed correctly, displaying as little square blocks instead. This may occur most often when viewing our character etymology pages. The reason for this is that when we decompose a character into its component parts, the parts themselves may not be valid stand-alone characters or they may have been valid characters in the distant past but are currently obsolete and not available in the fonts installed on your computer. When this happens, you may simply ignore the undisplayed character since it is usually pretty easy to deduce which part of the original character the undisplayed character is supposed to be.

For those of you who would like to see as many of these characters displayed as poosible, you could try installing additional fonts on your device. One of the fonts with greatest coverage of the obsolete Chinese characters is the hanazono font, which can be downloaded from here. We can't help you with font installation instructions as these vary widely by device. Do note that Safari will still not display some of these characters.