Oxis Chinese Character Finder

The Oxis Chinese Character Finder is an online tool (and method) for entering Chinese characters.

A set of twenty-four abstract graphics is used to describe the printed form of Chinese characters. Each graphic is represented by a single ascii digit or letter, and the graphics themselves can be approximated with Chinese characters. The characters and their text equivalents are:

目1 日2 罒3 夕4 口5 乂6 牛7 十8 ノ9 八A 阝B 丶D 山E 一H 丨I 亅J 长K 乚L 弓S 厂T 冂U ㄥV 人Y フZ

These are combined according to a small set of rules that can be used implicitly or shown explicitly. The main rules are:

• combine as a sequence, q;
• combine as a superposition, p;
• use as an influence, n.

White space is designated by an underscore or a hyphen, and brackets can be used to disambiguate certain combinations. A complete character is represented by a string of ascii text.

The oxis schema is used as an input system for Chinese characters by entering part or parts of a character (optionally as a mixture of oxis text, oxis graphics, and constituent Chinese characters) to invoke all the characters in a particular set that contain these graphics in this order. The set searched can be restricted in several specific ways, for example by entering an R to find radicals only. This is currently implemented for the first 2000 Chinese characters (simplified and traditional) plus radicals in a website designed for users with slight to moderate familiarity with Chinese. It also lets users create their own searchable subsets.