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Folklore is the body of expressive culture, including tales, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, superstitions, and so forth, common to a particular population, that comprise the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. Scholars who study folklore are often called folklorists. Much of folklore study has been academic, classifying material and identifying original forms. Applied folklorists, on the other hand, use folklore and other traditional cultural material to address social problems.

A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. Four percent of Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms, but most characters are pictophonetics, characters containing two parts where one indicates a general category of meaning and the other the sound. There are approximately 50,000 Chinese characters in existence, but only between three and four thousand are in regular use.