Most complex Chinese characters? Fancy a bowl of noodles?

[BWL]

http://studymorechinese.com/profiles/blogs/complex-strokes-character

The name of a noodle from Shaanxi province biang biang mian, might have one of the most complex hanzi in modern use. It takes 57 strokes to write and is not even found in the Kangxi dictionary no to mention most online dictionaries!

Next time you go to Shaanxi, do order a bowl of biang biang mian!

[linguaholic]

A few days ago, in my classical chinese class, our teacher introduced a chinese character with 64 strokes:

It is actually one character, however it consists of four times the element dragon. The character is pronounced zhe2 (second tone) and it meant talkative, garrulous in ancient times.

[BWL]

Yes, I've read about this character, it must take several minutes to write! Thank goodness it is not in common use anymore!

[Hedonologist]

A few days ago, in my classical chinese class, our teacher introduced a chinese character with 64 strokes:

It is actually one character, however it consists of four times the element dragon. The character is pronounced zhe2 (second tone) and it meant talkative, garrulous in ancient times.

If that's 1 character I'm assuming them you would have to write each 'component' at a quarter of it's normal size, is that even practical?

[Language-Student]

I ran this past my wife who knows many languages and comes straight from China's south. None of these are just one character in Mandarin, neither the first example, nor the second! It can be easily seen that one character has a single syllable pronunciation in English. The first one is part of a word; by itself it is pretty much meaningless. The second is never one character. It might be pronounced in a single syllable, but it is really one character repeated four times, as in 高高高，just meaning very, very tall or high. 

My Mandarin character text book, at the end of chapter 9, highlights the single un-repeated character with the highest number of strokes with a meaning in itself, which is nang (fourth pronunciation stroke) 齉, which means "snuffling" or "speaking with a snuffle". It takes 36 strokes to write. It is relatively common knowledge, but is rarely used.

Of the 6600 Chinese characters in common use today, it is the nine-stroke characters which see the highest percentage of use today... that's 785 nine-stroke characters! Methinks we need to go for quantity of characters over impressive stroke numbers per character!