Traditional Chinese characters (正體字, pinyin: zhèngtǐ zì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. The other form is simplified Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters are most popular in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities.

Among Chinese people, Traditional Chinese characters are also called Complicated Chinese characters or Complex Chinese characters (繁體字/fántǐ zì), or orally Old characters (老字/lǎo zì). The fantizi designation may, in some aspects, be incorrect, however, as some argue that the traditional characters could not be called "complex" as they were never made more complex; the characters were preserved the way they were. Some supporters of simplified Chinese characters object strongly to the description of these characters as zhèng (正, "traditional"), as this character also connotes "correct" or "proper".

When printing text, people in Mainland China and Singapore mainly use the simplified system, which was developed by the People's Republic of China government in the 1950s. However, the PRC also prints material intended to be read outside of Mainland China using traditional characters. In handwritten text, most Chinese use informal individual simplifications, and there are some characters in which an informal simplified form is more common even in traditional Chinese text, notably the Tai in Taiwan.

In computer text applications, Traditional Chinese is most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme.

Traditional characters are also used in Korean Hanja, and moderately simplified traditional characters are used in Japanese Kanji.

See also: Chinese character