There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have developed a number of methods to order and sort characters to facilitate more convenient reference.
Chinese dictionaries have been published for over two millennia, beginning in the Han dynasty. This is the longest lexicographical history of any language. In addition to works for standard Chinese, beginning with the 1st-century CE Fangyan dictionaries also been created for the many varieties of Chinese. One of the most influential Chinese dictionaries ever published was the Kangxi Dictionary, finished in 1716 during the Qing dynasty, with the list of 214 Kangxi radicals it popularized are still widely used.
Terminology The general term cishu () semantically encompasses "dictionary; lexicon; encyclopedia; glossary". The Chinese language has two words for dictionary: zidian (character dictionary) for written forms, that is, Chinese characters, and cidian (word/phrase dictionary), for spoken forms.
For character dictionaries, zidian () combines zi (; "character, graph; letter, script, writing; word") and dian ( "dictionary, encyclopedia; standard, rule; statute, canon; classical allusion").
For word dictionaries, cidian is interchangeably written (/; cídiǎn; tzʻŭ²-tien³; "word dictionary") or (/; cídiǎn; tzʻŭ²-tien³; "word dictionary"); using cí (; "word, speech; phrase, expression; diction, phraseology; statement; a kind of poetic prose; depart; decline; resign"), and its graphic variant cí (; "word, term; expression, phrase; speech, statement; part of speech; a kind of tonal poetry"). Zidian is a much older and more common word than cidian, and Yang notes zidian is often "used for both 'character dictionary' and 'word dictionary'.
Traditional Chinese lexicography The precursors of Chinese dictionaries are primers designed for students of Chinese characters. The earliest of them only survive in fragments or quotations within Chinese classic texts. For example, the Shizhoupian was compiled by one or more historians in the court of King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827 BCE – 782 BCE), and was the source of the zhòuwén variant forms listed in the Han dynasty Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. The Cangjiepian ("Chapters of Cang Jie"), named after the legendary inventor of writing, was edited by Li Si, and helped to standardize the Small seal script during the Qin dynasty.
The collation or lexicographical ordering of a dictionary generally depends upon its writing system. For a language written in an alphabet or syllabary, dictionaries are usually ordered alphabetically. Samuel Johnson defined dictionary as "a book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning" in his dictionary. But Johnson's definition cannot be applied to the Chinese dictionaries, as Chinese is written in characters or logograph, not alphabets. To Johnson, not having an alphabet is not to the Chinese's credit, as in 1778, when James Boswell asked about the Chinese characters, he replied "Sir, they have not an alphabet. They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed". Nevertheless, the Chinese made their dictionaries, and developed three original systems for lexicographical ordering: semantic categories, graphic components, and pronunciations.
Semantically organized dictionaries The first system of dictionary organization is by semantic categories. The circa 3rd-century BCE Erya ("Approaching Correctness") is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary, and scholarship reveals that it is a pre-Qin compilation of glosses to classical texts. It contains lists of synonyms arranged into 19 semantic categories (e.g., "Explaining Plants", "Explaining Trees"). The Han dynasty dictionary Xiao Erya ("Little Erya") reduces these 19 to 13 chapters. The early 3rd century CE Guangya ("Expanded Erya"), from the Northern Wei dynasty, followed the Eryas original 19 chapters. The circa 1080 CE Piya ("Increased Erya"), from the Song dynasty, has 8 semantically based chapters of names for plants and animals. For a dictionary user wanting to look up a character, this arbitrary semantic system is inefficient unless one already knows, or can guess, the meaning.
Two other Han dynasty lexicons are loosely organized by semantics. The 1st century CE Fangyan ("Regional Speech") is the world's oldest known dialectal dictionary. The circa 200 CE Shiming ("Explaining Names") employs paranomastic glosses to define words.
Graphically organized dictionaries The second system of dictionary organization is by recurring graphic components or radicals. The famous 100–121 CE Shuowen Jiezi ("Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters") arranged characters through a system of 540 bushou (; "section header") radicals. The 543 CE Yupian ("Jade Chapters"), from the Liang dynasty, rearranged them into 542. The 1615 CE Zihui ("Character Glossary"), edited by during the Ming dynasty, simplified the 540 Shuowen Jiezi radicals to 214. It also originated the "radical-stroke" scheme of ordering characters on the number of residual graphic strokes besides the radical. The 1627 Zhengzitong ("Correct Character Mastery") also used 214. The 1716 CE Kangxi Dictionary, compiled under the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty, became the standard dictionary for Chinese characters, and popularized the system of 214 radicals. As most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic ones (), the radical method is usually effective, thus it continues to be widely used in the present day. However, sometimes the radical of a character is not obvious. To compensate this, a "Chart of Characters that Are Difficult to Look up" (), arranged by the number of strokes of the characters, is usually provided.
Phonetically organized dictionaries The third system of lexicographical ordering is by character pronunciation. This type of dictionary collates its entries by syllable rime and tones, and produces a so-called "rime dictionary". The first surviving rime dictionary is the 601 CE Qieyun ("Cutting [Spelling] Rimes") from the Sui dynasty; it became the standard of pronunciation for Middle Chinese. During the Song dynasty, it was expanded into the 1011 CE Guangyun ("Expanded Rimes") and the 1037 CE Jiyun ("Collected Rimes").
The clear problem with these old phonetically arranged dictionary is that the would-be user needs to have the knowledge of rime. Thus, dictionaries collated this way can only serve the literati.
A great number of modern dictionaries published today arrange their entries by pinyin or other methods of romanisation, together with a radicals index. Some of these pinyin dictionaries also contain indices of the characters arranged by number and order of strokes, by the four corner encoding or by the cangjie encoding.
Some dictionaries employ more than one of these three methods of collation. For example, the Longkan Shoujian of the Liao dynasty uses radicals, which are grouped by tone. The characters under each radical are also grouped by tone.
Functional classifications Besides categorizing ancient Chinese dictionaries by their methods of collation, they can also be classified by their functions. In the traditional bibliographic divisions of the imperial collection Complete Library of the Four Treasuries , dictionaries were classified as belonging to xiǎoxué (, lit. "minor learning", the premodern equivalent of "linguistics"), which was contrasted with dàxué (, "major learning", i.e., learning that had moral implications). Xiaoxue was divided into texts dealing with xùngǔ (, "exegesis" similar to "philology"), wénzì (, "script", analogous to "grammatology"), and yīnyùn (, "sounds and rhymes," comparable to "phonology").
The Xungu type, sometimes called yǎshū (, "word book"), comprises Erya and its descendants. These exegetical dictionaries focus on explaining meanings of words as found in the Chinese classics.
The Wenzi dictionaries, called zìshū ( "character book"), consist of Shuowen Jiezi, Yupian, Zihui, Zhengzitong, and the Kangxi Dictionary. This type of dictionary, which focuses on the shape and structure of the characters, subsumes both "orthography dictionaries", such as the Ganlu Zishu () of the Tang dynasty, and "script dictionaries", such as the Liyun () of the Song dynasty. Although these dictionaries center upon the graphic properties of Chinese characters, they do not necessarily collate characters by radical. For instance, Liyun is a clerical script dictionary collated by tone and rime.
The Yinyun type, called yùnshū ( "rime book"), focuses on the pronunciations of characters. These dictionaries are always collated by rimes.
While the above traditional pre-20th-century Chinese dictionaries focused upon the meanings and pronunciations of words in classical texts, they practically ignored the spoken language and vernacular literature.
Modern Chinese lexicography The Kangxi Dictionary served as the standard Chinese dictionary for generations, is still published and is now online. Contemporary lexicography is divisible between bilingual and monolingual Chinese dictionaries.
Chinese–English dictionaries
The foreigners who entered China in late Ming and Qing dynasties needed dictionaries for different purposes than native speakers. Wanting to learn Chinese, they compiled the first grammar books and bilingual dictionaries. Westerners adapted the Latin alphabet to represent Chinese pronunciation, and arranged their dictionaries accordingly.
Two Bible translators edited early Chinese dictionaries. The Scottish missionary Robert Morrison wrote A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823). The British missionary Walter Henry Medhurst wrote a Hokkien (Min Nan) dialect dictionary in 1832 and the Chinese and English Dictionary in 1842. Both were flawed in their representation of pronunciations, such as aspirated stops. In 1874 the American philologist and diplomat Samuel Wells Williams applied the method of dialect comparison in his dictionary, A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, which refined distinctions in articulation and gave variant regional pronunciations in addition to standard Beijing pronunciation.
The British consular officer and linguist Herbert Giles criticized Williams as "the lexicographer not for the future but of the past", and took nearly twenty years to compile his A Chinese-English Dictionary (1892, 1912), one that Norman calls "the first truly adequate Chinese–English dictionary". It contained 13,848 characters and numerous compound expressions, with pronunciation based upon Beijing Mandarin, which it compared with nine southern dialects such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Fuzhou dialect. It has been called "still interesting as a repository of late Qing documentary Chinese, although there is little or no indication of the citations, mainly from the Kangxi Zidian [Kangxi Dictionary]." Giles modified the Chinese romanization system of Thomas Francis Wade to create the Wade-Giles system, which was standard in English speaking countries until 1979 when pinyin was adopted. The Giles dictionary was replaced by the 1931 dictionary of the Australian missionary Robert Henry Mathews. Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, which was popular for decades, was based on Giles and partially updated by Y.R. Chao in 1943 and reprinted in 1960.
Trained in American structural linguistics, Yuen Ren Chao and Lien-sheng Yang wrote a Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947), that emphasized the spoken rather than the written language. Main entries were listed in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and they distinguished free morphemes from bound morphemes. A hint of non-standard pronunciation was also given, by marking final stops and initial voicing and non-palatalization in non-Mandarin dialects.