Hanja Information in the Entries of Korean Unabridged Dictionary

For language information processing that includes both Hangul and Hanja, an electronic dictionary supporting Hangul and Hanja simultaneously is necessary. This paper examined statistical information on Hanja entries of Korean Unabridged Dictionary such as the number of entries that include Hanja based on the KSC-5601 character set, the frequency of the pronunciation and meaning of each character of Hanja included in the entries, the frequency per part of speech of Hanja in entries and the average number of Hanja characters per entry. At least one or more of Hanja characters appear in 303,951 entries out of 440,594, accounting for 68.99% of the total. 858,595 characters of Hanja are included in the 440,594 entries, which is 1.95 Hanja characters per entry. As the average syllable length of the entries is 3.56 and the average count of the Hanja characters per entry is 1.96, it can be said that 54.7% of all the characters of the entries are in Hanja. Among 4,888 Hanja character codes, 4,660 are used once or more, whereas 228 Hanja codes never appear in any entry. There were 5 characters which appear more than 4,000 times. A total of 858,595 Hanja characters used in all the entries correspond to 471 Hangeul codes.