# Crisis = 危機

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crisis/736542>\
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\
**Created:** [November 3, 2015, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crisis/736542 "2015-11-03T18:08:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\
**Post date:** [November 3, 2015, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crisis/736542/1 "2015-11-03T18:08:22Z")

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> **[Is the Chinese word for “crisis” a combination of “danger” and “opportunity”?](https://www.straightdope.com/21343499/is-the-chinese-word-for-crisis-a-combination-of-danger-and-opportunity)**

Was Slug given the characters in question to draw, or did he actually research himself to find out which characters we were talking about? I was somewhat shocked to see the right characters there and not generic faux-Chinese.

In 2000 the use of encoding schemes which had all the Chinese characters probably was limited so they couldn’t use them in the text easily like I did in the thread title. Of course, the other problem is that it’s almost impossible to recognize characters when they’re shrunk down to the same height as English text which doesn’t have as many complicated elements.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2015, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crisis/736542/2 "2015-11-15T20:26:41Z")

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> [@glowacks](#):
>
> In 2000 the use of encoding schemes which had all the Chinese characters probably was limited so they couldn’t use them in the text easily like I did in the thread title.

Eh, depends on software, then as now. By 2000, Unicode as we know it pretty much existed: It wasn’t trying to fit the world’s glyphs into a 16-bit space anymore, so it could begin to come to terms with CJK writing systems, and fonts for at least the few thousand most common Chinese characters already existed due to pre-Unicode text encoding schemes created specifically for Chinese.

Good Unicode support wasn’t common in 2000, but it definitely existed.