The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (commonly abbreviated to HKSCS) is a set of Chinese characters -- 4,702 in total in the initial release -- used exclusively in Cantonese.
Due to the inherent differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, the Hong Kong government recognized the need for a standardized set of "proprietary" characters that would allow for the streamlining of electronic communication; at the time, the Big5 Chinese encoding scheme did not contain a vast majority of these characters (some were erroneously cross-listed with similar characters). Subsequently, the HKSCS-1999 (HKSCS 1999 specification) was born. Following its acceptance, a newer revision was released in 2001, adding 116 new characters.
The HKSCS is currently supported by Big5 and the ISO 10646.
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