Ideographs are characters in a writing system where each character represents a meaning or concept. Chinese characters (kanji) are the most representative ideographs, used across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Unicode includes over 90,000 CJK Unified Ideographs.

Ideographs contrast with phonographic characters (alphabets, hiragana). While phonographic characters represent sounds, ideographs directly express concepts and meanings. Chinese characters and linguistics books provide systematic coverage.

Unicode's CJK Unified Ideographs unify characters used in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The same code point may have different glyphs depending on the language.

For character counting, ideographs convey more information per character, so the same content tends to require fewer characters than phonographic writing. CJK characters and computing books provide additional context.