Written Chinese
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language
Part I, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, is supertitled in Chinese—but not English—as a "character dictionary" (). It was a Chinese-to-English dictionary, organized by the 214 radical system employed by the 1716 "Kangxi Dictionary". These radicals are the initial or major graphic components of Chinese characters, ranging from 1 to 17 strokes. In Morrison's dictionary, Volume I starts with Radical 1 (, "one") and ends at Radical 41 ( ("thumb; Chinese inch") ; Volume II starts with Radical 42 (, "small") and stops at Radical 119 (, "rice") ; and Volume III begins with Radical 120 (, "silk") and ends the dictionary with Radical 214 (, "flute") . Vols. II & III were published simultaneously in London by Kingsbury, Parbury, & Allen.