Nüshu

Nüshu — the name means simply "women's writing" — is one of the only scripts in the world known to have been created and used chiefly by women. In Jiangyong County in Hunan, where formal education in Chinese characters was a male preserve, women developed their own script and kept it among themselves: written on paper fans and handkerchiefs, embroidered into cloth, and sung. Its most famous form is the "third-day missive" (sanzhaoshu), a cloth booklet a woman received from her sworn sisters and mother after marriage.

Crucially, Nüshu is not the Chinese characters its signs resemble: where a Han character stands for a meaning, a Nüshu sign stands for a sound — a syllable of the local dialect — so the same script could be read aloud as the women actually spoke. See the descent context in the Han Wing, and the contrast with logographic Han.

Where the men's characters carried meaning, the women's signs carried sound.

Its signs are slender, slanting rhomboids, so delicate they were nicknamed "mosquito writing". The tradition nearly died in the 20th century — its last natural inheritor is generally said to have died in 2004 — and survives today through deliberate revival.

A Nüshu sign is phonetic: it records a syllable of the spoken dialect, not a meaning. This is the reverse of the logographic Han characters used all around it, where each character stands for a word or morpheme. The signs themselves are slender, slanting rhomboids drawn in fine strokes — the style that earned Nüshu the nickname "mosquito writing." The institute shows the signs below as representative samples and does not assign sounds to individual code points.