Reference

Chinese reading and coverage glossary

The words behind the numbers: coverage, segmentation, and the vocabulary schemes the tools use, defined in plain English. 13 terms.

Character vs word: A distinction that trips up beginners: a character (hanzi) is a single written symbol, while a word can be one, two, or more characters together. HSK counts are word counts, not character counts, and the two totals are different, so a "2,500 characters" figure should never be compared directly with a word count.
Coverage: The share of the words in a text that a reader already recognizes. If you know every word except a few, your coverage is high and the text feels readable. Reading research commonly cites roughly 95 percent known-word coverage for comfortable extensive reading and roughly 98 percent for comfortable independent reading. Coverage is a word-recognition estimate, not a guarantee that you understand every sentence.
Frequency rank: A word's position in a corpus by how often it appears in real Chinese, where a lower rank means more common. The word tables here sort by frequency so the words you will actually meet most are at the top, which gives the fastest payoff per word learned.
Hanzi (Chinese character): A single Chinese character, the basic written unit of the language. One character maps to roughly one syllable and often to a unit of meaning, but most everyday words are built from two or more characters. On this site the 简 column shows the simplified hanzi for each word.
HSK: The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, the official standardized test of Mandarin proficiency for non-native speakers, run by China's education authorities. HSK is both an exam you can sit for a certificate and a graded vocabulary syllabus that tells you which words to learn in what order, which is useful even if you never take the test.
HSK 2.0: The six-level version of the HSK exam in use since 2010, topping out at about 5,000 words at HSK 6. Many test centers still administer it, which is why this site keeps a 2.0-vs-3.0 toggle on every word list so you can study against the exam your center actually offers.
HSK 3.0: The nine-level HSK standard announced in 2021, grouped into three bands and reaching a much larger vocabulary than the old exam. It also makes speaking mandatory from Level 3. Adoption has been staggered, so both HSK 2.0 and HSK 3.0 are in real use right now.
Pinyin: The official system for writing Mandarin sounds in the Latin alphabet, with tone marks over the vowels. It tells you how a character is pronounced. "nǐ hǎo" is the pinyin for 你好 (hello). Every word list on this site shows tone-marked pinyin next to the hanzi so you can read a word before you can write it.
Segmentation: Splitting a run of Chinese characters into words. Chinese is written without spaces, so a tool has to decide where one word ends and the next begins before it can score coverage. Any automatic segmenter mis-splits ambiguous strings, names, and words outside its dictionary, which is why coverage figures are close estimates rather than exact counts.
Simplified characters: The streamlined character set used in mainland China and Singapore, standardized in the 1950s and 1960s to have fewer strokes. The HSK exam uses simplified characters, so they are the default (the 简 column) on every word list here.
Spaced repetition: A review method that resurfaces each word just before you would forget it, stretching the gap between reviews as the word sticks. It is far more efficient than rereading a list, because you spend time only on words at risk, and it is the standard tool serious vocabulary learners rely on.
Token: A single counted unit of text. After segmentation, a Chinese sentence becomes a list of word tokens, and coverage is computed over the tokens that are actual Chinese words. Punctuation, spaces, and Latin letters are excluded from the count, so the percentage reflects the Chinese vocabulary in the text rather than its overall length.
Traditional characters: The older, fuller character forms still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many overseas communities. Many characters are identical in both sets; where a word's traditional form differs, this site shows it in the 繁 column so you can recognize it when reading outside the mainland.