Concept
movable type
Making each character a separate piece so that it can be set into a page, printed and then reused; developed in clay, wood and metal in different parts of the world.
In woodblock printing an entire page is carved into a single block, and the block prints only that page. In movable type each character is a separate piece: the pieces are set, a page is printed, then the pieces are taken apart and reused on another page. The history of the method does not belong to a single country: it is documented that baked clay characters were tried in China in the 1040s, that a book printed with metal type (the Jikji) survives from Korea in 1377, and that books were printed with metal type in Mainz in the 1450s .
Because whole-page blocks often remained cheaper for writing systems with thousands of characters, such as Chinese, movable type did not become dominant in China .
Example
(Hypothetical example.) A language with an alphabet of about thirty letters needs a small type case; a writing system with thousands of characters needs one that is far bigger and slower to manage.