Traditional Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 繁體字; simplified Chinese: 繁体字; Pinyin: Fántǐzì) refers to Chinese characters in any character set which does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. It most commonly refers to characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong, or in the Kangxi Dictionary. The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, and have been more or less stable since the 5th century (during the Southern and Northern Dynasties.) The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are currently used in Taiwan (Republic of China), Hong Kong, Macau and in Guangzhou, although the number of printed materials in simplified characters is growing in Australia, USA and Canada, targeting or created by new arrivals from mainland China. A large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia in official publications. The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities.

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese (in which case they may be called hanzi;汉字/漢字 "Han character") and Japanese (kanji). Such characters are also used, albeit less frequently, in Korean (hanja), and were formerly used in Vietnamese (hán tự), as well as a number of other languages. Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world.

Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of these are minor graphic variants only encountered in historical texts. Studies carried out in China have shown that functional literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.

In Chinese orthography, the characters are largely morphosyllabic, each corresponding to a spoken syllable with a distinct meaning. However, the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters. About 10% of native words have two syllables without separate meanings, but they are nonetheless written with two characters. Some characters, generally ligatures, represent polysyllabic words or even phrases, though this is the exception and is generally informal.