This chapter discusses issues of Chinese characters used in dialect recording. Dialect literature, dictionaries, textbooks, and dialect studies must rely on characters to record dialect vocabulary and sentences. Residents in dialect areas also occasionally use characters to record their colloquial vocabulary in daily life, such as for accounting and letter writing. However, standard square-block Chinese characters cannot represent all words. In dialectology studies, words with sounds but no corresponding characters, that is, meaningful syllables with phonetics but lacking characters or homophones, are generally represented by a square □, followed by the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, in the Wuhan dialect, the word for “myopia” is recorded as □/tɕʰiou5/ 眼. Some characters used for dialect recording are the same as the square-block Chinese characters used by the general population, while others differ. There are four categories of dialect-recording characters that need to be discussed: etymologically valid characters for dialect words, modern written forms chosen merely to represent the correct meanings of etymologically obscure words, miscellaneous dialect characters, and alphabetic writing for dialects.