Court officials in the Han Dynasty believed that small seal script characters, which were standardized under Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi when he unified China, took too much time to write because Chinese characters at the time were written using curved lines instead of more angular lines. So Han officials decided to simplify writing Chinese characters by using multiple strokes, or lines, to form characters and radicals, rather than long curved lines. The changed small seal script characters are now commonly known as Hanzi (Simplified Chinese: 汉字 / Traditional Chinese: 漢字, meaning "Han characters"), because they were from the Han Dynasty. Hanzi became the standard writing system of Chinese and it even spread to other countries and languages. It was also used (with some differences) in the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages.