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龘 dá: 龘（读音为dá、ㄉㄚˊ [7]）是一个汉语汉字，部首为龍，“龖”的异体字 [8]，字义指龙飞的样子

I got this character in a WeChat New Year message. It has 3 x 17 strokes, I believe.

Even that made up biangbiangmian character only has 57 strokes, I believe, but this is a real character, I think!

齉 has only 36 strokes!

[龖

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None of the existing answers are bad, but I want to add an alternate answer, becuase this is a tricky question. Its very easy to list something that is old and not used or unknown meaning to any regular people. There have even been characters in the past over a hundred strokes-- but if they were even real terms is questionable, certianly not ever true vocab.

So, I want to offer an alternative of actually used modern vocab that has many strokes, and an actually used in old texts big character.

modern use: 齉 is considered by many as the most strokes in a character actually used as normal vocab, a term for a stuffy nose you could use in any sentence ((although you are way more likely to hear it said out loud than see it written down haha)).

ancient use: would be enter image description here image courtesy of chairman bao-- a character that wasn't believed to be widely used but has been defined to mean thief ((many big character contenders have no known meaning or use)).

there is no set answer here, since you can easily disqualify certain things to not count. If you only want to count characters in regular education, you aren't gonna break the thirty stroke mark. If you want to include character reduplication you will easily break 100. I personally don't count reduplication, for the same reason if you said “really really really" in english, I wouldn't count that as a different term from just saying really. At least for the duplicate characters we know the meaning of, thats exactly it. Still the original glyphs meaning, just.... duplicated two three four or more times. Compare 木、林、森, very common modern characters in the same principle as those ancient glyphs of 龘 and so on. ((if others feel differently to each their own, it is a tricky question, chinese english or otherwise)).

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  • There are lots of duplicated characters that aren’t just a ‘repetition’ of the singular character. You could see 林 lín ‘forest’ as a ‘repeated’ 木 mù ‘tree’, but 森 sēn ‘dark, dense, orderly, rigorous’ can hardly be considered as such, and 朋 péng ‘friend’ is definitely neither ‘flesh flesh’ nor ‘moon moon’, and 品 pǐn ‘article, product’ isn’t ‘mouth mouth mouth’.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Feb 15 at 19:30
  • And even within characters that are in current – if not exactly common – use, there is the 58-stroke 𰻝 biáng (only recently Unicode-encoded, so probably tofued here) used in the name of the famous biángbiang noodles.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Feb 15 at 19:34
  • @JanusBahsJacquet if you count biang thats a valid opinion, many people don't, the same way many people don't count supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as a real word in english-- even though its well known. All characters have multiple meanings, even the gloomy or in close rows is still related directly to tree tree tree, product or item still related to three boxes. maybe this article you will like zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E4%B8%89%E5%8F%A0%E5%AD%97
    – zagrycha
    Commented Feb 16 at 5:29
  • Yes, if you go deep enough, all Chinese characters (not just the ones consisting of repeated individual characters) describe their meaning through some form of ideographic logic. That is, after all, the entire principle of the system. My point was that even if there is an underlying logic in reduplicated characters, they are not generally comparable to just repeating the word in English at all. Saying ‘tree tree’ does not in any way imply or mean ‘forest’ in English (just as saying 木木 would not be understood to mean 林 in Chinese).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Feb 16 at 12:01
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Is 龘 a contender for "character with the most strokes"?

no

there’s a “unicoded” character u+2a6a5, composed by 4 dragons 😸

enter image description here

further, another “unicoded” character u+3106c is composed by 3 clouds “on top of” 3 dragons 😹

enter image description here

have fun :)

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    I wouldn't consider this kind of "character" real. It's just a made-up jumble mumble
    – Tang Ho ♦
    Commented Feb 14 at 13:22
  • I must be drawing it wrong, or I can't count! Or both! Sorry! Oh well, but it is near the top! 几条龙是一个队?
    – Pedroski
    Commented Feb 14 at 13:24
  • @TangHo, moi aussi lah, but the unicode consortium accepted these 😾 and assigned code point 🙀
    – 水巷孑蠻
    Commented Feb 14 at 13:26
  • 與其話係字，不如話係符好過啦，根本就係冇字搞字
    – Tang Ho ♦
    Commented Feb 14 at 13:33
  • @TangHo, 真係冇字搞字，搞咗份 pdf：CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G Unicode block (U+30000-3134F)；一路睇一路鬧 google.com/…
    – 水巷孑蠻
    Commented Feb 14 at 13:47
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Don't foget this guy:

𱁬

But that's more Kanji than Hanzi...

64 stroke Chinese character:

𠔻

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  • I'll simplify that: 正
    – Pedroski
    Commented Feb 14 at 15:07

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