For other uses, see big five (disambiguation).

Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan (Hong Kong for Traditional Chinese characters. Its Mainland China equivalent is GB.

Organization

The original Big5 character set is sorted first by usage frequency, second by stroke count, lastly by KangXi Radicals.

The original Big5 character set missed many commonly used characters. To solve this problem, each vendor developed its own extension. The ETen extension became part of the current Big5 standard through popularity.

Name

Big5's Chinese name 五大碼 or 大五碼 (pinyin: wǔdà mǎ or dàwǔ mǎ), means "Big Five Encoding." The name refers to the original design goal to support the five major software packages used in Taiwan at the time, or to the five leading computer companies in Taiwan (宏碁 (hóng qí; Acer [1] (http://www.acer.com.tw)), 神通 (shén tōng; MiTAC [2] (http://www.mitac.com.tw)), 佳佳 (jīa jīa; ?), 零壹 (líng yī; Zero One ([3] (http://www.zerone.com.tw)), 大眾 (dà zhòng; FIC [4] (http://www.fic.com.tw))) that collaborated to develop the code.

History

The Big5 encoding was defined by the Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan in 1984. According to some accounts, Big5 was popularized by its adoption in several commercial software packages, especially the ET Chinese system which ran on MS-DOS.

The Republic of China government declared it their standard in mid-1980s since Big5 was already the de facto standard by that time.

Hong Kong also adopted Big5 for character encoding. However, Cantonese uses many archaic Chinese characters that were not available in the normal Big5 character set. To solve this problem, the Hong Kong Government created the Big5 extensions "Government Chinese Character Set" in 1995 and Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set in 1999. The Hong Kong extensions are commonly distributed as a patch.

See also

• Unicode
• Chinese input methods for computers

External links

• Chinese character codes: an update (http://iriz.hanazono.ac.jp/irizhtml/multling/codes.htm) by Christian Wittern
• Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set Info (http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/)

References

• Lunde, Ken (1999). CJKV Information Processing. First Edition. O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. ISBN 1565922247.