Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on character recognition with priming by both stroke-based and radical-based neighbors. Targets with higher-frequency neighbors had longer response latencies (and lower accuracies). This study confirmed that the orthographic NF effect exists in Chinese compound characters. Additionally, different definitions of neighbors cause varied patterns of the NF effect in the condition of high-frequency targets. The findings were explained in terms of activation and inhibition processes in the interactive activation framework.