Category talk:Ghost kanji

What is it

What is Ghost kanji? –dMoberg 11:08, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

See ghost kanji shoot, no entry for it. I have no idea, then. --Mglovesfun (talk) 11:44, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

See this languagehat blog entry from April 21, 2006: GHOST CHARACTERS. — hippietrail

And the No-sword blog entry from 2006-04-20: Who you gonna call? And how you gonna look up their phone number? — hippietrail (talk) 13:28, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

RFD

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

Entries in this category are by definition uncitable. They should be deleted and this category should be removed. -- Liliana • 23:15, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

To be honest I was not aware of the existence of ghost kanji until it was brought up here, but your logic is irrefutable. It would be like a category of "unused English words." It sounds like a task for a different type of project. A simple search over a large corpus would do it, and WT is many things, but a large corpus it is not. --Haplology (talk) 16:17, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I would think the entries have a right to an RFV.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:57, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, we need to check these aren't used before any deletion. That doesn't apply to the category, just the entries in it. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:29, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

• Just poking around some, I found that at least some of these might be used in names. Looking at the corresponding JA WP article ja:w:幽霊文字, they define these as:

幽霊文字（ゆうれいもじ）とは、JIS基本漢字に含まれる、典拠不明の文字の総称。幽霊漢字（ゆうれいかんじ）、幽霊字（ゆうれいじ）とも呼び、英語ではghost charactersと訳される。

Ghost characters is the general term for characters included in the list of JIS basic kanji that are of uncertain source. These are also called ghost kanji or ghost letters, and in English, this label is translated as ghost characters.

I just found that the EN WP article on w:JIS X 0208 has a section about just this, at w:JIS_X_0208#Kanji_from_unknown_sources.

In light of these descriptions, it looks like these characters are not uncitable, so much as unsourceable. Given the background, I'm also not sure that we should remove this category. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:11, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

But what exactly is the difference? Are they in use, or have they ever been in use, or not? That's what matters really. I would think that unsourceable implies uncitable, because if citations existed then they would have a source (at least, presuming that JIS is better at finding citations than we are). —CodeCat 00:19, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

• Unsourceable means that no one can ascertain the source: where did these characters first come from? Are these characters originally from Chinese? Or were they composed in Japan from existing kanji elements?
• Uncitable means that no one can find any citations of these characters in use. This is clearly not the case, for although these characters might not be in common use, they do show up (at least the ones I've sought). Poking about suggests that these characters might see more use in names than in general vocabulary. See google:"橸樹" for some uses of the ghost kanji 橸 in the common Japanese male given name Masaki. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:22, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Move to an Appendix with explanation. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:57, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

• Kept due to no discussion. --ElisaVan (talk) 21:13, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Tea Room

See Wiktionary:Tea room/2023/May#(and_Category:Ghost_kanji_more_generally). - -sche (discuss) 17:47, 11 September 2023 (UTC)