Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual letters or punctuation). The world's first known movable-type (made from wood) system for printing was created in China around 1040 AD by Pi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song Dynasty.
The first metal (copper alloy) movable-type system for printing was made in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). This led to the printing of the Jikji (the abbreviated title of a Korean Buddhist document,) in 1377, today the oldest extant movable metal print book.
The metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, eventually leading to today's modern typography and fonts.
The distinct disadvantage that Asian cultures had with type elements was the basic structure of their written language. In the middle ages a person working in Latin had just 23 characters to reproduce in type. Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.
In the Chinese writing system, the characters are monosyllabic, each usually corresponding to a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. However, although Chinese words may be formed by characters with basic meanings, a majority of words in Mandarin Chinese require two or more characters to write (thus are polysyllabic) but have meaning that is distinct from but dependent on the characters they are made from. Cognates in the various Chinese languages and dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character.
