When was the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary first published?
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
Although the War Department dictionary was never widely distributed or used, it affected Chao's and Yang's "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese", and served as the model for two well-known dictionaries. Yale University's Institute of Far Eastern Languages published a revised edition "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" (1966), and Fred Fangyu Wang published a two-volume "Mandarin Chinese dictionary", Chinese-English (1967) and English-Chinese (1971). With these dictionaries, "American efforts in Chinese lexicography effectively ceased" (Norman 1988: 176)—until the "ABC Chinese-English Dictionary" (1996).
John Richard Clark Hall
Hall published two translations of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem "Beowulf", in addition to multiple editions of "A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary". His first edition of the dictionary was published in 1894, and attempted to ease access by ordering entries by the words as they were actually spelled in common editions of Old English texts. As Hall himself acknowledged in the second edition that followed in 1916, however, this "was admittedly an unscientific [approach], and opened the door to a good many errors and inconsistencies". With the second edition he adopted the conventional method of using "normalised" entry words. A third edition followed in 1931, a reprinting with a supplement by Herbert Dean Meritt came in 1960, and this was itself reprinted in 1984.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary
It is a version of "Oxford Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary" published by The Commercial Press. Publication deal between Oxford University Press and The Commercial Press was approved in 1983.English-German dictionaries are two-way dictionaries published in association with Duden.It is an electronic version of Concise Oxford-Duden German Dictionary.
It is a two-way dictionary.
Oxford Classical Dictionary
The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD) is generally considered "the best one-volume dictionary on antiquity," an encyclopedic work in English consisting of articles relating to classical antiquity and its civilizations. It was first published in 1949 ("OCD" or "OCD"), edited by Max Cary with the assistance of H. J. Rose, H. P. Harvey, and Alexander Souter. A second edition followed in 1970 ("OCD"), edited by Nicholas G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, and a third edition in 1996 ("OCD"), edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. A revised third edition was released in 2003, which is nearly identical to the previous third edition. A fourth edition was published in 2012 ("OCD"), edited by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow. In 2016, a fully digital edition ("OCD") launched online, edited by Sander Goldberg (2013–2017) and Tim Whitmarsh (2018–present). Continuously updated on a monthly basis, this edition incorporates all 6,300 entries from "OCD" (which are being updated on a rolling basis) as well as newly commissioned entries, and features multimedia content and freely accessible maps of the ancient world.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
In 1867, Giles passed the competitive Foreign Office examination for a Student lnterpretership in China, and began studying the Chinese language at Peking. He later criticized his first Chinese book, a Part II reprint of Robert Morrison's (1815-1823) "A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts", because it failed to mark aspiration, "much as if an English-Chinese dictionary, for the use of the Chinese, were published without the letter "h", showing no difference between the conjunction "and" and the "[h]and" of the body" (Aylmer 1997: 8).
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Giles' "A Chinese-English Dictionary" has received both acclaim and censure. An early critic, the Chinese Malaysian scholar Gu Hongming (1857-1928) criticized Giles' lack of overall insight into Chinese literature, and said
It is this want of philosophical insight in Dr. Giles which makes him so helpless in the arrangement of his materials in his books. Take for instance his great dictionary. It is in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method. As a dictionary for the purposes of the scholar, Dr. Giles' dictionary is decidedly of less value than even the old dictionary of Dr. Williams. (1915: )
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The present dictionary has several titles:
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a dictionary of slang originally compiled by the noted lexicographer of the English language, Eric Partridge. The first edition was published in 1937 and seven editions were eventually published by Partridge. An eighth edition was published in 1984, after Partridge's death, by editor Paul Beale; in 1990 Beale published an abridged version, Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
A team of scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing developed a free web edition of "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" and published it online in 1999. The web edition comprises a total of 8,169 head characters, 40,379 entries of Chinese words or phrases, and 44,407 explanatory entries of grammatical usage. Chinese character encoding is in the Big5 system (which includes 13,053 traditional Chinese characters), which does not encode simplified Chinese characters or uncommon characters (represented as "□" in the dictionary) included in Unicode's 80,388 CJK Unified Ideographs. The web edition dictionary replaces Lin Yutang's obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh system with modern standard pinyin romanization, which users can hear pronounced through speech synthesis. It also abandons Lin's obsolete Instant Index System, which "has not been widely used since its inception", and provides three machine-generated indexes by radical, pinyin, and English.
Hanyu Da Cidian
The Hanyu Da Cidian () is the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary. Lexicographically comparable to the "Oxford English Dictionary", it has diachronic coverage of the Chinese language, and traces usage over three millennia from Chinese classic texts to modern slang. The chief editor Luo Zhufeng () (1911–1996), along with a team of over 300 scholars and lexicographers, started the enormous task of compilation in 1979. Publication of the thirteen volumes began with first volume in 1986 and ended with the appendix and index volume in 1994.
Irene Saunders
"The Right Word in Chinese" is a dictionary that is the first of its kind with Pinyin romanization of the Putonghua language or Modern-day Standard Mandarin Chinese published in 1985. It evolved from Irene Saunders' experience of working in China while having a limited knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. The proceeds of the dictionary were donated to the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), particularly for the endangered panda. It later became one of the sources for many modern-day English–Chinese / Chinese–English dictionaries.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
In Shanghai, DeFrancis' dictionary was published under the title "Han-Ying Cidian: ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" (Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe, 1997). For reasons of political correctness, the Shanghai edition amended the entry for Lin Biao (Sawer 2001: 225). It altered the original American edition's "veteran Communist military leader and Mao Zedong's designated successor until mysterious death" to "veteran Communist military leader; ringleader of counterrevolutionary group (during Cultural Revolution)".
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
John DeFrancis (1911–2009) was an influential American sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. After he retired from teaching in 1976, DeFrancis was a prolific author of influential works such as "" (1984) and "Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems" (1989).
Chinese encyclopedia
Among printed encyclopedias, the earliest was the (1917) "The Encyclopaedia Sinica" compiled the English missionary Samuel Couling. The 1938 "Cihai" ("Sea of Words") is a general-purpose encyclopedic dictionary that covers many fields of knowledge. The Zhonghua Book Company published the first edition, and the Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House issued revised editions in 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009, making the "Cihai" a standard reference work for generations. The 1980-1993 "Zhongguo Da Baike Quanshu" or "Encyclopedia of China" is the first comprehensive (74 volume) Chinese encyclopedia. Compilation began in 1978, and the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House published individual volumes from 1980 through 1993. There is a 2009 concise second edition, as well as CD-ROM and online versions. The (1981–83) "Zhonghua Baike Quanshu" or "Chinese Encyclopedia" is a 10-volume comprehensive reference work published by the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan. An online version is also available. The 1985–91 Chinese-language edition "Concise Encyclopædia Britannica" or "Jianming Buliedian Baike Quanshu" is an 11-volume translation based on the Micropædia portion of the 1987 15th edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica".
Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
In 1928, Mathews was assigned to the China Inland Mission headquarters in Shanghai, where he could fully utilize his printing and Chinese linguistic skills. They commissioned him to revise two out-of-print China Inland Mission publications by Frederick W. Baller, the (1900) "Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary" and (1900) "Mandarin Primer". Robert Mathews and his wife Violet worked intensively to complete the (1931) "Chinese-English Dictionary" in only 3 years (he calls it a "rush job"), and then, for westerners seeking a "working knowledge" of Chinese, the (1938) "Kuoyü Primer: Progressive Studies in the Chinese National Language" in 7 years during the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (Brooks 2008). In 1943, Japanese occupation troops interned Mathews, commandeered the CIM compound in Shanghai to use as their headquarters, and destroyed both the dictionary printing plates and Mathews' manuscripts and proofs for a revised edition.
Chinese dictionary
The British consular officer and linguist Herbert Giles criticized Williams as "the lexicographer not for the future but of the past" (Wilkinson 2013: 85), and took nearly twenty years to compile his "A Chinese-English Dictionary" (1892, 1912), one that Norman (1988:173) 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." (Wilkinson 2013: 85.) 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. (Wilkinson, 2013: 85)
Webster's Dictionary
Noah Webster (1758–1843), the author of the readers and spelling books which dominated the American market at the time, spent decades of research in compiling his dictionaries. His first dictionary, "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language", appeared in 1806. In it, he popularized features which would become a hallmark of American English spelling ("center" rather than "centre", "honor" rather than "honour", "program" rather than "programme", etc.) and included technical terms from the arts and sciences rather than confining his dictionary to literary words. Webster was a proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both philological and nationalistic. In "A Companion to the American Revolution" (2008), John Algeo notes: "it is often assumed that characteristically American spellings were invented by Noah Webster. He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them. Rather [...] he chose already existing options such as "center, color" and "check" on such grounds as simplicity, analogy or etymology". In William Shakespeare's first folios, for example, spellings such as "center" and "color" are the most common. He spent the next two decades working to expand his dictionary.
Oxford English Dictionary
Despite its considerable size, the "OED" is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers' dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the "Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca" is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612; the first edition of "Dictionnaire de l'Académie française" dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the "Diccionario de la lengua española" (produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716.
Robert Henry Mathews
On his return to the CIM Shanghai headquarters, the CIM tasked Mathews with revising F.W. Baller's "Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary", first published in 1900. Mathews completed his "Chinese-English Dictionary" in 1931, a 1200-page volume. The CIM then commissioned Mathews to revise Baller's "Mandarin Primer", first published in 1900. Mathews completed the "Kuoyü Primer: Progressive Studies in the Chinese National Language" in 1938, totalling 790 pages.
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese is a cookbook and introduction to Chinese cuisine and Chinese food culture by Chao Yang Buwei. It was first published in 1945, and appeared in revised and expanded editions in 1949 and 1956; the third and final edition appeared in 1968. Much of the text was written by her husband, Y.R. Chao, who coined the English terms "stir fry" and "pot stickers." It has been called "the first truly insightful English-language Chinese cookbook."
Dictionary of American English
The work was begun in 1925 by William A. Craigie. The first volume appeared in 1936 under the editorship of Craigie and James R. Hulbert, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. The four volume edition was completed with the help of George Watson and Allen Walker Read.
Wade–Giles
Wade–Giles was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a scholar of Chinese and a British ambassador in China who was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge University. Wade published in 1867 the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English, "Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi" (), which became the basis for the romanization system later known as Wade–Giles. The system, designed to transcribe Chinese terms for Chinese specialists, was further refined in 1892 by Herbert Allen Giles (in "A Chinese-English Dictionary"), a British diplomat in China and his son, Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum.
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Oxford Intermediate Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (牛津進階英漢雙解詞典/牛津中階英漢雙解詞典) is targeted for secondary school readers. It was first published in 2001.
The "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary", previously entitled the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English", started life as the "Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary", edited by Albert Sydney Hornby. It was first published in Japan in 1942. It then made a perilous wartime journey to Britain where it came under the wing of OUP, which decided it would be the perfect counterpart for the prestigious OED.
Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary
The Chinese and English Dictionary: Containing All the Words in the Chinese Imperial Dictionary, Arranged According to the Radicals (1842), compiled by the English Congregationalist missionary Walter Henry Medhurst (1796-1857), is the second major Chinese-English dictionary after Robert Morrison's pioneering (1815-1823) "A Dictionary of the Chinese Language". Medhurst's intention was to publish an abridged and cheaper dictionary that still contained all the 47,035 head characters from the (1716) "Kangxi Dictionary", which Morrison's huge dictionary included. Medhurst reversed and revised into his Chinese-English dictionary in compiling the (1847-1848) English and Chinese Dictionary in Two Volumes.
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Simplified Chinese versions of Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (牛津高阶英汉双解词典/牛津高階英漢雙解詞典) has been published by The Commercial Press since 1988. Traditional Chinese version has been published by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd. since 4th edition.
The Five Thousand Dictionary
The Five Thousand Dictionary: A Chinese-English Dictionary… (1926) or Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket-Dictionary (1942), which was compiled by American missionary Courtenay H. Fenn, is a widely reprinted learners' dictionary that selected Chinese character entries on the basis of common usage. It was the first Chinese-English dictionary to indicate the neutral tone associated with weak syllables.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
In the history of bilingual Chinese lexicography, Giles' (1892, 1912) "A Chinese-English Dictionary" is the fourth major Chinese-English dictionary after Robert Morrison's (1815-1823) "A Dictionary of the Chinese Language", Walter Henry Medhurst's (1842) "Chinese and English Dictionary", and Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language". Giles' dictionary was superseded by Robert Henry Mathews' (1931) "A Chinese-English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission". In contrast to Morrison, Medhurst, Williams, and Mathews, who were all Christian missionaries in China, Giles was an agnostic anti-clericalist (Aylmer 1977: 2).
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
At the beginning of World War II, the shortage of Chinese and Japanese bilingual dictionaries became an urgent matter for English-speaking Allies. The Harvard–Yenching Institute said the need for Chinese dictionaries in America had "grown from chronic to acute", and selected two "practical dictionaries" to revise and reprint—without either author's permission—for "the immediate demands of American students" (Mathews 1943: v). Both photolithographic reproductions were retitled: "The Five Thousand Dictionary" (5th ed., 1940) became "Fenn's Chinese-English Pocket-Dictionary" (1942) and "" (1931) became "Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary" (1943). Y. R. Chao contributed to both these reprints. He revised the introduction and wrote the Standards of Pronunciation, Styles of Pronunciation, and Tones sections for "Fenn's" (1942: xxii-xxiv), and wrote the Introduction on Pronunciation for "Mathews"' (1943: ix-xvii).
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
Scott McGinnis, professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, explains that users of the "ABC Dictionary" who are already familiar with written Chinese and dictionaries organized by character headings must "forget" what they know about the Mandarin syllabic inventory and focus strictly on the spelling. For some dictionary users, purely pinyin-dependent sequencing such as "cuānzi" 镩子 "ice pick" to "cūbào" 粗暴 "rude; rough; crude" and "nǎngshí" 曩时 "(written) in olden days; of yore" to "nánguā" 南瓜 "pumpkin" "may be at least initially confusing" (1997: 568).
Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary
Medhurst printed, at his own expense, the "Chinese and English Dictionary: Containing all the words in the Chinese imperial dictionary, arranged according to the radicals" in 1842, at Parapattan Batavia, Dutch East Indies.
Chinese encyclopedia
Among major online Chinese encyclopedias, for Standard Chinese, the two largest both began in 2005, the Baike.com Encyclopedia and the Baidu Encyclopedia. There is the Chinese Wikipedia (2002–present), and for varieties of Chinese, there are Cantonese, Mindong, Minnan, Wu, and Gan Wikipedias, as well as the Classical Chinese Wikipedia. Lastly, there are modern English-language encyclopedias of China. For example, the 1991 2nd edition of the "Cambridge Encyclopedia of China", the 2009 "Brill's Encyclopedia of China", and the 5-volume 2009 "Berkshire Encyclopedia of China".
Penguin English Dictionary
The Penguin English Dictionary is a one-volume English-language dictionary published by Penguin Books. It is their flagship dictionary with over 70,000 entries, first published in 2000.
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language
In 1909, a revised edition that replaced Williams' romanization system with standard Wade-Giles was published: "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yüan Yin. By S. Wells Williams, LL. D., and Alphabetically Rearranged According to the Romanization of Sir Thomas F. Wade, by a Committee of the North China Mission of the American Board".
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language
In retrospect, a "major flaw" in Morrison's dictionary is the failure to distinguish the phonemic contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants . Herbert Giles's "Chinese-English Dictionary" says Morrison's 1819 volume gave no aspirates, "a defect many times worse" than would be omitting the rough breathing in a Greek lexicon, and Medhurst's 1843 edition attempted aspirates, but omitted many and wrongly inserted others . Samuel Wells Williams's 1874 "Syllabic Dictionary" was apparently the first dictionary to get this distinction sorted out .
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts or Morrison's Chinese dictionary (1815-1823), compiled by the Anglo-Scottish missionary Robert Morrison was the first Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary. Part I is Chinese-English arranged by the 214 Kangxi radicals, Part II is Chinese-English arranged alphabetically, and Part III is English-Chinese also arranged alphabetically. This groundbreaking reference work is enormous, comprising 4,595 pages in 6 quarto volumes and including 47,035 head characters taken from the 1716 "Kangxi Dictionary". However, Morrison's encyclopedic dictionary had flaws, notably failing to distinguish aspirated consonants: the pronunciation "taou" is given for both aspirated "táo" (桃, "peach") and unaspirated "dào" (道, "way; the Tao").
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
Yuen Ren Chao and Lien-sheng Yang divided the lexicographical work. Yang compiled the preliminary list of entries, partially drafted the definitions, served both as informant and as grammarian on Beijing dialect, and wrote the characters. Chao wrote most of the definitions, added pronunciations from regional varieties of Chinese, and wrote the front matter and the appendices (1947: vii). Chao and Yang finished compiling their "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" in 1945, the same year when the War Department published the anonymous "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese: Chinese-English, English-Chinese". Although the 847-page "Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" is large, it contains relatively few lexical items, approximately 2,500 English-Chinese head entries in 500 pages and 5,000 Chinese-English ones in 300 pages (1945: 1).
Wenlin Software for learning Chinese
The dictionary contains an electronic version of the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary by John DeFrancis and the Shuowen Jiezi seal character dictionary. The current version (4.3.2) contains more than 300,000 Chinese-English entries and over 60,000 English-Chinese entries.. It allows users to search for Chinese characters or words by inputting either Chinese characters or pinyin using a variety of input options, including handwriting recognition. Users can update existing entries add new definitions to the dictionary. The program can also be extended with additional data modules, such as the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese.
Medhurst's Chinese and English Dictionary
The first published evaluation of the (1842-1843) "Chinese and English Dictionary" was an anonymous 1843 review in "The Chinese Repository", which was a Protestant missionary periodical published in Canton. On the one hand, the reviewer praises the dictionary's portability and price, "two octavo volumes containing 1500 pages for ten dollars", but on the other, expresses regret that Medhurst "has said so little on the subject of "tones"" other than "that he considers them of paramount importance" (Anon 1843: 499).
Chinese Pidgin English
Historically, it was a modified form of English developed in the 17th century for use as a trade language or lingua franca between the English and the Chinese. Chinese Pidgin started in Guangzhou, China, after the English established their first trading port there in 1664. Pidgin English was developed by the English and adapted by the Chinese for business purposes. The term "pidgin" itself is believed by some etymologists to be a corruption of the pronunciation of the English word "business" by the Chinese. Chinese Pidgin continued in use until about the end of the 19th century, when Pidgin came to be looked upon by the Chinese as humiliating (because English speakers considered it ridiculous) and so preferred to learn standard English instead.
Cihai
The Cihai is a large-scale dictionary and encyclopedia of Standard Mandarin Chinese. The Zhonghua Book Company published the first "Cihai" edition in 1938, and the Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House revised editions in 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. A standard bibliography of Chinese reference works (Teng and Biggerstaff 1971:134) calls the "Cihai" an "outstanding dictionary".
Westernisation in Hong Kong
Chinese Pidgin English is a language created in the early 17th century by locals in Guangzhou region to facilitate trades between the Chinese and British after the British has established treaty ports in the region after the First Opium War. The Chinese Pidgin English is recorded in the Chinese Almanac (Tung Shing) for readers to learn.
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language
Samuel Williams spent 11 years compiling "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language". The dictionary preface (1874: v) explains that he first planned to rearrange "A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect" and "fit it for general use" but he soon realized that its "incompleteness required an entire revision". Williams began compilation in 1863, when he was chargé d'affaires for the United States in Beijing, and after realizing that foreigners required more than a wordlist of common Chinese terms, he decided to produce a successor to Morrison's dictionary (Williams 1889: 346).
Encyclopedia of China
The Encyclopedia of China () is the first large-entry modern encyclopedia in the Chinese language. The compilation began in 1978. Published by the Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, the encyclopedia was issued one volume at a time, beginning in 1980 with a volume on astronomy; the final volume was completed in 1993. It comprised 74 volumes, with more than 80,000 entries. Arranged by subject, which numbered 66 (some subjects occupy more than one volume), within each subject, entries were arranged by pinyin as many modern Chinese dictionaries have been. A Uyghur language edition was also published in 2015.
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language
In November 1871, Williams traveled to Shanghai to oversee printing of the dictionary, and returned intermittently until publication in 1874 (Williams 1889: 390). After thieves stole 250 stereotype printing plates of the dictionary from the Mission House in 1879, Williams made corrections and additions for the revised pages, which were used in a new 1881 edition (Williams 1889: 440). The American Presbyterian Mission Press continued to reprint Williams' original "A Syllabic Dictionary" for 30 years up until 1903.
Webster's Dictionary
The American edition of Charles Annandale's four volume revision of "The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language", published in 1883 by the Century Company, was more comprehensive than the "Unabridged". The "Century Dictionary", an expansion of the "Imperial" first published from 1889 to 1891, covered a larger vocabulary until the publication of "Webster's Second" in 1934, after the "Century" had ceased publication.
Century Dictionary
Although no revised edition of the dictionary was ever again published, an abridged edition with new words and other features, "The New Century Dictionary" (edited by H.G. Emery and K.G. Brewster; revision editor, Catherine B. Avery,) was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts of New York in 1927, and reprinted in various forms for over thirty-five years. The "New Century" became the basis for the "American College Dictionary", the first "Random House Dictionary", in 1947. The three-volume "New Century Cyclopedia of Names", an expansion of the 1894 volume, was published in 1954, edited by Clarence Barnhart.
A Dictionary of the English Language
In 1598 an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English dictionary to use quotations ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; in none of these dictionaries so far were there any actual definitions of words. This was to change, to a small extent, in schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall", published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449 words, and no word beginning with the letters "W", "X", or "Y", this was the first monolingual English dictionary.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
The history of "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" began in late 1965, when Lin and Li Choh-ming, the founding Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, made plans for compiling a new Chinese-English dictionary as a "lasting contribution to knowledge" (1972: xvi). When the dictionary was published, Lin acknowledged that Li's "vision and enthusiastic support" made the compilation project possible. Lin started working on the dictionary in Taipei, and in the spring of 1967, he accepted the position of Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Qian 2011: 251). After completing the manuscript in the spring of 1971, Lin moved to Hong Kong, where his former student Francis Pan and a team of young Chinese University graduates assisted him with copyediting, research, and final preparations (Durdin 1972: 37).
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" claims six lexicographical distinctions.
Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache
Begun in 1897 as a research project at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the dictionary is also known as the "Berlin Dictionary". Interrupted by both World War I and World War II, the first volumes were published in 1926 and the final volume released in 1961. Today the dictionary forms the basis of the new "Altägyptisches Wörterbuch" ("Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian"), a comprehensive update of the original and an online digitization project being conducted under the auspices of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1993.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (1972), compiled by the linguist and author Lin Yutang, contains over 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 words and phrases, including many neologisms. Lin's dictionary made two lexicographical innovations, neither of which became widely used. Collation is based on his graphical "Instant Index System" that assigns numbers to Chinese characters based on 33 basic calligraphic stroke patterns. Romanization of Chinese is by Lin's "Simplified National Romanization System", which he developed as a prototype for the Gwoyeu Romatzyh or "National Romanization" system adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. Lin's bilingual dictionary continues to be used in the present day, particularly the free online version that the Chinese University of Hong Kong established in 1999.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
Tang suggests an improvement for future "ABC Dictionary" editions. Users who want to look up an unfamiliar character may find the layout of Stroke-Order Index and Radical Index to be "awkward, inconvenient, and time-consuming" because after looking the character up, the index gives the pinyin pronunciation instead of the page (2005: 146).
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
Lin's "Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" was his second lexicographical effort. From 1932 to 1937, he compiled a 65-volume monolingual Chinese dictionary that was destroyed by Japanese troops during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, except for 13 volumes that he had shipped earlier to New York (Durdin 1972: 37).
Lu Zhuangzhang
The linguist, sinologist, and lexicographer John DeFrancis dedicated his innovative "ABC Chinese-English Dictionary" to Lu Zhuangzhang and five other advocates of Chinese script reform, and described him as the "Pioneer reformer whose publication in 1892 of alphabetic schemes for several varieties of Chinese marked the beginning of Chinese interest in reform of the writing system" (1996: vi).
A Chinese–English Dictionary
The American sinologist and linguist Jerry Norman (1998: 173) calls Giles' dictionary the "first truly adequate Chinese-English dictionary", with pronunciation glosses that were "by and large free of the artificiality found in earlier works". He also says that Giles, like his predecessors, mixed literary and colloquial definitions together without distinction, and concludes that the dictionary "remains a rich depository of nineteenth-century Peking colloquial words and phrases, in other respects it has been superseded by later dictionaries".
A recent book on Chinese lexicography says Giles' dictionary has "special significance and interest" and "enjoys pride of place in the history of Chinese bilingual dictionaries as the authoritative source for the Wade-Giles system of Romanization." (Yong and Peng 2008: 387).
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (), also known as A Dictionary of Current Chinese or Contemporary Chinese Dictionary is an important one-volume dictionary of Standard Mandarin Chinese published by the Commercial Press, now into its 7th (2016) edition. It was originally edited by Lü Shuxiang and Ding Shengshu as a reference work on modern Standard Chinese. Compilation started in 1958 and trial editions were issued in 1960 and 1965, with a number of copies printed in 1973 for internal circulation and comments, but due to the Cultural Revolution the final draft was not completed until the end of 1977, and the first formal edition was not published until December 1978. It was the first People's Republic of China dictionary to be arranged according to Hanyu Pinyin, the phonetic standard for Standard Chinese, with explanatory notes in simplified Chinese. The subsequent second through seventh editions were respectively published in 1983 (Reorganized Edition- now seen as the '2nd edition'), 1996 (Revised Edition- now seen as the '3rd edition'), 2002 (2002 Supplemental Edition- now seen as the '4th edition'), 2005 (5th edition), 2012 (6th edition) and 2016 (7th edition).
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).
Joseph Emerson Worcester
Worcester continued to revise his dictionary, producing "A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language" in 1846. When a British edition of the work stated that it was based on the work of Noah Webster, and omitted Worcester's introductory statement claiming otherwise, he responded with "A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed".
In 1860, Worcester published "A Dictionary of the English Language", a substantially revised and expanded work which was soon recognized as a major English language dictionary. The first copies were electrotype printed at the Boston Stereotype Foundry. The dictionary featured numerous illustrations throughout the text, a relatively new innovation. However, Worcester's work was not technically the first American dictionary to feature illustrations. Having heard about the plans for Worcester's new edition, Webster's publishers, George and Charles Merriam, rushed to put out a similar work. They managed to publish a Pictorial Edition of Webster's "American Dictionary" in 1859. The Pictorial Edition was basically a reprint of the 1847 "American Dictionary", with engravings taken from the Imperial Dictionary of the English Language. More competition arrived in the form of the Merriam's revised edition of Webster's "American Dictionary", which appeared in 1864. Worcester's dictionary was posthumously revised in 1886, but was eclipsed by "Webster's International" and other dictionaries of the 1890s.
Grand Ricci
It has become widely known since its publication in 2001, Le Grand Ricci is the most comprehensive up-to-date dictionary of Chinese into a modern Western language. Though it covers the whole history of Chinese language development, most of the dictionary deals with early and imperial period Chinese language usage.""It is difficult to imagine any scholar in Chinese studies who will not eagerly welcome this new digital incarnation of the Le Grand Ricci. Le Grand Ricci is to all purposes the most comprehensive bilingual dictionary of Chinese in the Western world. It covers three millennia of the Chinese language, from the Classics to the modern age, and is encyclopedic in its scope. The compilers were able to draw on the full range of French sinological expertise in completing the project. Since its publication Le Grand Ricci has established itself as an indispensable reference tool. Now available online, and easily searchable, its functionality has only further increased.""Wilt L. Idema. Research Professor of Chinese Literature, HarvardOn the 11th of May, 2010, the DVD version was presented for the first time at the Shanghai Museum. The resources of the Ricci dictionary are available on Android phones and tablets and Apple IOS via Pleco Software.
Oxford Dictionary of English
The Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is a single-volume English dictionary published by Oxford University Press, first published in 1998 as The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE). The word "new" was dropped from the title with the Second Edition in 2003. This dictionary is not based on the "Oxford English Dictionary" and should not be mistaken for a new or updated version of the OED. It is a completely new dictionary which strives to represent as faithfully as possible the current usage of English words.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary
"Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary" contains entries from contemporary Australian and international English. Edited by Dr Bruce Moore, it incorporates entries from "Oxford English Dictionary", "Concise Oxford Dictionary", and the "Australian National Dictionary".
"Concise Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary" (牛津現代英漢雙解大詞典/牛津现代英汉双解大词典) is published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in China. Online version became available in 2011.
Century Dictionary
The first edition was in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations. It was edited by Sanskrit scholar and linguist William Dwight Whitney, with Benjamin Eli Smith's assistance. It was a great expansion of the smaller "Imperial Dictionary of the English Language", which in turn had been based on the 1841 edition of Noah Webster's "American Dictionary".
After Whitney's death in 1894, supplementary volumes were published under Smith's supervision, including "The Century Cyclopedia of Names" (1894) and "The Century Atlas" (1897). A two-volume "Supplement" of new vocabulary, published in 1909, completed the dictionary. A reformatted edition, "The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia," was published in 1911 in twelve quarto volumes: ten of vocabulary, plus the volume of names and the atlas. This set went through several printings, the last in 1914. The same year, the ten vocabulary volumes were published as one giant volume, about 8500 pages in a very thin paper. The now much coveted India paper edition also appeared around this time, usually in five double volumes (rarely, in 10 single volumes) plus one additional for the Cyclopedia.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The front matter includes a Table of contents; Dedication to "China's Staunchest Advocates of Writing Reform"; Editor's Call to Action; Acknowledgments; Introduction with I. Distinctive Features of the Dictionary and II. Selection and Definition of Entries; and User's Guide with I. Arrangement of Entries, II. Orthography, III. Explanatory Notes and Examples, IV. Works Consulted, and V. Abbreviations (1996: i–xix).
Reuben Alcalay
His "Complete English-Hebrew dictionary" (1961, 2,150 pages) aimed to contain all the modern Hebrew terms decided upon by the Hebrew Language Academy, and thousands of other new coinages from the Hebrew press literature. The first edition received a three-page review in the magazine of the American Jewish Congress in 1964. The companion volume, "Complete Hebrew-English Dictionary," (מילון אנגלי עברי שלם) was published in 1965.
A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English
A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, also referred to as Kenyon and Knott, was first published by the G. & C. Merriam Company in 1944, and written by John Samuel Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott. It provides a phonemic transcription of General American pronunciations of words, using symbols largely corresponding to those of the IPA. A similar work for English pronunciation is the "English Pronouncing Dictionary" by Daniel Jones, originally published in 1917 and available in revised editions ever since.
Romanization of Chinese
The first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in Latin alphabet is thought to have been designed in 1583-88 by Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri for their Portuguese-Chinese dictionary — the first ever European-Chinese dictionary. Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934. The dictionary was finally published in 2001. During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary as well, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables were indicated with diacritical marks. This work has also been lost but not rediscovered.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Giles' Chinese-English dictionary remained in "constant use" for generations (Yong and Peng 2008: 387). A compact edition was reprinted by Paragon Books (Chicago) in 1964, Ch'eng Wen (Taibei) in 1978, and is still available online (Yang 1985: 288).
Chinese dictionary
Chinese lexicography advanced during the 1970s. The translator Lin Yutang wrote the semantically sophisticated "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" (1972) that is now available online. The author Liang Shih-Chiu edited two full-scale dictionaries: Chinese-English (Liang and Fang 1971) with over 8,000 characters and 100,000 entries, and English-Chinese (Liang 1975) with over 160,000 entries.
ABC-CLIO
ABC-CLIO was founded in 1953 as a privately held corporation by Eric Boehm with its first publication, "Historical Abstracts". The name represents the company's two original divisions when it incorporated in 1969: ABC stands for American Bibliographical Center and CLIO Press is named after Clio, the muse of history from ancient Greek mythology. According to Boehm, he had always been interested in history so when he noticed that there were not many good historical abstracting services available, he started publishing the "Historical Abstracts".
During the 1960s, a sister bibliographic and abstract publication on American history was added, "America: History and Life", which was considered an award-winning title. The company entered into digital publishing with electronic data in the 1960s and in 1975, it published its first online database called "DIALOG". During the 1980s, ABC-CLIO expanded into providing primary reference books such as encyclopedias and dictionaries and stopped publishing bibliographic books. In the 1990s, ABC-CLIO began to provide access to its humanities database on CD-ROM. The "Exegy Current Events" CD-ROM was named "Best Disc of the Year" by Library Journal. In 1998, ABC-CLIO provided electronic access to "America: History and Life". By the 2000s, one of the company's most popular products had become online databases for researching many topics in the field of the humanities. In 2001, ABC-CLIO began to publish eBooks, initially providing 150 different titles to schools and libraries. The company's reference books had won numerous awards, and the company started a series of subject-related online databases for secondary school use. In 2004, the company acquired the quarterly historical journal, "Journal of the West", which has been published since 1962.
In 1996, ABC-CLIO merged with an electronic publishing company, Intellimation, which also produced educational software. The merger brought Becky Snyder, ABC-CLIO's current president, from Intellimation. It sold "Historical Abstracts" and "America: History and Life" to EBSCO Publishing in 2007.
Dictionary of American English
A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (DAE) is a dictionary of terms appearing in English in the United States that was published in four volumes from 1938 to 1944 by the University of Chicago Press. Intended to pick up where the "Oxford English Dictionary" left off, it covers American English words and phrases in use from the first English settlements up to the start of the 20th century.
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language
The publication of Morrison's dictionary attracted the attention of scholars worldwide, and Part II was reprinted from 1865 until 1913. The revised preface says the second part "has been generally commended by experienced Sinologues as the most perfect and useful of the whole" . In 1865, the London Mission Press in Shanghai and Trubner & Co. in London first republished Part II in 2 volumes, totaling 1630 pages. In 1913, Zhonghua Book Company reprinted Part II in a pocketbook size, which made it much more affordable and easier to carry .
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Oxford Elementary Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (牛津初階英漢雙解詞典) is targeted for primary school readers. It was first published in 1998.
American College Dictionary
The American College Dictionary was the first Random House dictionary and was later expanded to create the "Random House Dictionary of the English Language". First published in 1947, "The American College Dictionary" was edited by Clarence Barnhart based on the 1927 New "Century Dictionary".
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) was first published by Longman in 1978. The dictionary is available in various formats: paper only; paper with a bundled premium website; online access only or a gratis online version. "LDOCE" is an advanced learner's dictionary, providing definitions by using a restricted vocabulary, helping non-native English speakers to understand meanings easily.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
"ABC" gives grammatical information with around 30 tags, including both parts of speech ("V." for verb) and other tags ("ID." for idiom). "CED" provides just 11 grammatical tags, while "CCD" only marks numerals and classifiers. The comprehensive grammatical tags in "ABC" are "a most valuable feature", especially for learners of Chinese, and many words have more than one grammatical function (e.g., " xuéxí" 学习 [學習] ' study; learn; emulate ◆ ' learning"). Another useful "ABC" grammatical tag is B.F. for "bound form" (as opposed to free form words, mentioned above), but this distinction is not usually indicated in PRC dictionaries such as "CED" and "CCD" (Sawer 2004: 311).
Dictionary
In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, "". In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, "An American Dictionary of the English Language;" it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit.
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language
On the other hand, Morrison's Chinese dictionary has won critical acclaims from scholars all over the world since the publication of the first volume in 1815. Alexander Leith Ross wrote to Morrison that his dictionary had an extensive circulation in Europe, and would be "an invaluable treasure to every student of Chinese" . The French sinologist Stanislas Julien described Part II as "without dispute, the best Chinese Dictionary composed in a European language" . The American missionary William A. Macy said all the missionaries and scholars of Chinese had used Morrison's dictionary as the "common fountain" from which they could "obtain the knowledge they desired" . One modern scholar calls Morrison's dictionary "the greatest achievement of any researcher of Chinese" . Another describes the comprehensive bilingual dictionary compilation and publication project as "unprecedented and unsurpassed in 19th-century China" . Wu and Zheng say Morrison's was the first widely used Chinese-English dictionary and has served as a "milestone in the early promotion of communications between China and the West" . A recent book on Chinese lexicography says that although Morrison's dictionary "contained numerous errors" when examined from a modern perspective, "the dictionary delineated the basic configuration of a bilingual dictionary and shed a good deal of light upon the design and compilation of English-Chinese, Chinese-English, and other bilingual dictionary types" . Morrison's obituary notice summarizes his dedication and contribution to the world, "In efforts to make this [Chinese] language known to foreigners and chiefly to the English, he has done more than any other man living or dead." .
Merriam-Webster
The "Collegiate Dictionary" was introduced in 1898 and the series is now in its eleventh edition. Following the publication of "Webster's International" in 1890, two "Collegiate" editions were issued as abridgments of each of their "Unabridged" editions. With the ninth edition ("Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary" (WNNCD), published in 1983), the "Collegiate" adopted changes which distinguish it as a separate entity rather than merely an abridgment of the "Third New International" (the main text of which has remained virtually unrevised since 1961). Some proper names were returned to the word list, including names of Knights of the Round Table. The most notable change was the inclusion of the date of the first known citation of each word, to document its entry into the English language. The eleventh edition (published in 2003) includes more than 225,000 definitions, and more than 165,000 entries. A CD-ROM of the text is sometimes included. This dictionary is preferred as a source "for general matters of spelling" by the influential "The Chicago Manual of Style", which is followed by many book publishers and magazines in the United States. The "Chicago Manual" states that it "normally opts for" the first spelling listed.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
The first edition appeared in 1969, highly praised for its Indo-European etymologies. In addition to the normally expected etymologies, which for instance trace the word "ambiguous" to a Proto-Indo-European root "ag-", meaning "to drive," the appendices included a seven-page article by Professor Calvert Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and "Indo-European Roots", 46 pages of entries that are each organized around one of some thousand Proto-Indo-European roots and the English words of the AHD that are understood to have evolved from them. These entries might be called "reverse etymologies": the "ag-" entry there, for instance, lists 49 terms derived from it, words as diverse as "agent", "essay", "purge", "stratagem", "ambassador", "axiom", and "pellagra", along with information about varying routes through intermediate transformations on the way to the contemporary words.
Oxford English Dictionary
"The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English" was originally conceived by F. G. Fowler and H. W. Fowler to be compressed, compact, and concise. Its primary source is the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is nominally an abridgment of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It was first published in 1924.
Zhongwen Da Cidian
The Zhongwen Da Cidian, also known in English as the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, is an unabridged Chinese dictionary, edited by Zhang Qiyun and others. The first edition had 40 volumes including its radical index in volume 39 and stroke index in volume 40. It was published from 1962 through 1968.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Five years later, Giles published a 40-page brochure (1879) "On some Translations and Mistranslations in Dr. Williams' Syllabic Dictionary" that was reported extensively among English-language newspapers published in China (Aylmer 1997: 21). "I was badly mauled" in the "Daily Press (Hong Kong)", "received unstinted praise" in the "North China Daily News", and was supported in the "Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal", which said "the Dictionary is in fault in most of the instances given." Giles sent a copy of his brochure to Williams, but received no reply. Since Williams reprinted his dictionary from stereotype plates, he was unable to make corrections, and added a (1883) Errata and Corrections on a fly-sheet at the end—without acknowledgement of Giles' corrections.
Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
As noted above, the 1943 second edition "Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary" adds an introduction on Chinese pronunciation and over 15,000 editorial changes. Furthermore, it gives a 5-page List of Syllabic Headings for quick reference, since the original order of syllables "is not strictly alphabetic" (1943: v). Another feature of the new edition is indicating all cases of the unstressed neutral tone.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Herbert Giles created the first Chinese-English encyclopedic dictionary in two ways, with comprehensive explanations under head entries and with informative tables. His example was followed by many later Chinese-English dictionaries up to the present time (Yong and Peng 2008: 387). First, some dictionary entries include in-depth information. Take "pǔlu" 氆氇 "a woolen fabric made in Tibet" as an example. Giles gives "P'u" 氆 (9514) "An open-woven, thick woolen cloth, either plain or flowered, with a nap on one side, known as 氆氇. It comes from Tibet, and is used for making the winter caps of Lamas. Known to the Mongols as "cheng-mé" and "chalma"." Second, Giles's dictionary has six tables, in addition to the requisite table of the 214 Kangxi Radicals (essential for using a radical-and-stroke index) included by Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams. The tables are for Insignia of Official Rank, The Family Names, The Chinese Dynasties, Topographical, The Calendar, and Miscellaneous (Chinese numerals). Another table is found in the dictionary front matter, called the Table of Sounds (1892) or Table of Sounds for Dialects (1912).
Chinese History: A New Manual
The preliminary version of the manual (1973) was published by Harvard's East Asia Research Center. From 1998 until 2015 all editions were published by the Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute and distributed by Harvard University Press. The fourth edition was also published in Chinese and sold 11,500 copies in the first year (2016-2017). Starting with the Fifth edition (2018), Wilkinson decided as an experiment in lowering the sales price of the English edition to publish it himself and distribute it exclusively on Amazon. The fifth edition was also published digitally (on the Pleco platform, in November 2017).
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The "ABC Dictionary" has nine Appendices: I. Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography [promulgated by the State Language Commission in 1988]; II. Historical Chronology [from the Shang Dynasty c. 1700–1045 BC to the Republic of China "1912–1949" and People's Republic of China 1949–]; III. Analytic Summary of Transcription Systems [for Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Yale Romanization, and Zhuyin Fuhao]; IV. Wade-Giles/Pinyin Comparative Table; V. PY/WG/GR/YR/ZF Comparative Table; VI. Radical Index of Traditional Characters, Notes on Kangxi Radicals, Kangxi Radical Chart, Kangxi Radical Index; VII. Stroke Order List of Recurrent Partials; VIII. Stroke Order Index of Characters with Obscure Radicals; IX. Radical Index of Simplified Characters, with Notes on Selected CASS Radicals [viz. the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences system of 189 radicals used in dictionaries like the "Xinhua Zidian"], High Frequency CASS Radicals, Simplified/Traditional Radical Conversion Table, CASS Radical Chart, CASS Radical Index [for users who want to look up a Chinese logograph's pronunciation, listing the 5,425 characters appearing in the dictionary] (1996: 835–897).
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
Michael Sawer, who also reviewed the original "ABC Dictionary", calls this comprehensive dictionary an "outstanding contribution to the field, in many ways better than other comparable dictionaries" (2004: 313). He makes comparisons between the "ABC Chinese–English Comprehensive Dictionary" (called ""ABC"") and two bilingual dictionaries aimed more at native speakers of Chinese who are learning English: the "Han-Ying Da Cidian" (Wu 1993, ""CED"" Chinese–English Dictionary) and "Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: Han-Ying Shuangyu" (CASSIL 2002, ""CCD"" Contemporary Chinese Dictionary).
New Catholic Encyclopedia
The original "Catholic Encyclopedia" was published between 1907 and 1914, first by the Robert Appleton Company, which was specifically created for that purpose, and then by its successor The Encyclopedic Press Inc. Supplements to the "Catholic Encyclopedia" were published in 1922 and in 1958. In 1960, the Catholic University of America, in collaboration with the McGraw-Hill Book Company, began work on what was planned as an entirely new encyclopedia, and seven years later (in 1967) published the 15-volume "New Catholic Encyclopedia" ("NCE1"). Alphabetic supplemental volumes appeared in 1974, 1979, 1989, and 1996.
A Dictionary of the English Language
Published on 4 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
In the history of Chinese lexicography, Mathews' dictionary was the last major compilation in the tradition of Christian missionaries in China. It began with Robert Morrison's (1815-1823) "A Dictionary of the Chinese Language", and continued with Walter Henry Medhurst's (1842) "Chinese and English Dictionary" and Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language"—excepting the anti-clericalist Herbert Giles' (1892, 1912) "A Chinese-English Dictionary" (Aylmer 1977: 2). Thus, Mathews' dictionary signifies the end of missionaries compiling Chinese bilingual dictionaries and the beginning of a new era for Chinese and English bilingual dictionaries, "based on stronger theoretical underpinnings and more sophisticated information technology as from the latter part of the twentieth century" (Yong and Peng 2008: 390).
Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
Up through the 1970s, English-speaking students of Chinese relied chiefly on Mathews' "Chinese-English Dictionary" (Norman 1988: 173). Scholars published several companion pieces for "Mathews". Tse-tsung Chow (周策縱) of the University of Wisconsin compiled (1972) "A New Index to Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary, Based on the "Chung" system for Arranging Chinese Characters", referring to the obsolescent "zhōng" 衷 indexing system based on character strokes. Olov Bertil Anderson of Lund University published (1972) "A companion volume to R. H. Mathews' Chinese-English dictionary", which went into a 335-page third revision in 1988. Harry M. Branch developed a Five Willows system and published (1973) "Mathews' and Fenn re-indexed" (Yang 1985: 290). Raymond Huang (1981) wrote a descriptive "Mandarin Pronunciation Explained with Diagrams: A Companion to R. H. Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary".
A Chinese–English Dictionary
The English sinologist Charles Aylmer, who first published "The Memoirs of H. A. Giles" from a Cambridge University Library manuscript, gives a balanced evaluation on the dictionary. Aylmer says the second edition "impresses by its sheer bulk" but falls short of the "highest standards of the best 19th-century lexicography". First, the dictionary does not cite sources for terms, but diversely includes both Classical Chinese literary archaisms from sources like the "Kangxi Dictionary" and modern vernacular colloquialisms that Giles "laboriously collected from books read and conversations held during a long stretch of years." Second, Giles failed to indicate stylistic level, which he justifies on the "(somewhat specious) grounds" that, "No division of phraseology into classical and colloquial has been made, for the simple reason that no real line of demarcation exists. Expressions are used in ordinary conversation which occur in the "Book of Odes". The book-language fades imperceptibly into the colloquial." (1912: viii). A third lexicographical shortcoming is the random arrangement of subentries, "requiring the reader to con up and down the columns". As a general rule, Giles explains (1892: vii), "the meanings found in the Classics stand first, and more modern and colloquial meanings follow. But to this rule there are some striking exceptions, purposely introduced, so as not to impair any value this Dictionary may have as a practical book of reference." Despite these deficiencies, Aylers says Giles' dictionary "held the field for many decades and lives on in successors", such as Robert Mathews' (1931) "A Chinese-English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission", many of whose definitions "are taken, without acknowledgment, from Giles". 
Today the dictionary is most often cited as the locus classicus of the so-called "Wade-Giles" romanisation system, for which the name of Giles is widely known even to non-specialists. Apart from this, its practical use is mainly as a repository of late Ch'ing bureaucratic phraseology, though it is replete with fascinating nuggets of information and is a wonderful book for browsing. (1997: 5)
Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary
The 1,250-page first edition contained 7,783 Chinese character head entries, alphabetically collated by romanized syllabic order in modified Wade–Giles system, and includes 104,000 words and phrases taken from the classics, general literature, and news media. Owing to a World War II shortage of Chinese–English dictionaries, Harvard University Press published a revised American edition (1943) "Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary", which included 15,000 corrections, revisions, and new examples.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
Reviews of DeFrancis' "ABC Chinese–English Dictionary" were published by major academic journals in linguistics (e.g., "The Modern Language Journal"), Asian studies ("Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"), and sinology ("China Review International"). Most reviewers criticized certain aspects, such as the difficulty of looking up a traditional Chinese character, but also highly evaluated the innovative dictionary.
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
Victor H. Mair, a sinologist and professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, first proposed the idea of a computerized pinyin Chinese–English dictionary in his 1986 lexicographical review article "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese." He defined "alphabetically arranged dictionary" to mean a dictionary in which all words ("cí" 詞) are "interfiled strictly according to pronunciation. This may be referred to as a "single sort/tier/layer alphabetical" order or series." He emphatically does not mean a usual Chinese dictionary collated according to the initial single graphs ("zì" 字) that are only the beginning syllables of whole words. "With the latter type of arrangement, more than one sort is required to locate a given term. The head character must first be found and then a separate sort is required for the next character, and so on." (1986: 2). Mair's article had two purposes, to call the attention of his colleagues to the critical need for an alphabetically arranged Chinese dictionary and to enlist their help in making it a reality, and to suggest that "all" new sinological reference tools should at least include alphabetically ordered indices. "Someone who already knows the pronunciation of a given expression but not its meaning should not be cruelly burdened by having to fuss with radicals, corners, strokes, and what not. Let him go directly to the object of his search instead of having to make endless, insufferable detours in an impenetrable forest of graphs." (1986: 20).
Arabic-English Lexicon
The Arabic–English Lexicon is an Arabic–English dictionary compiled by Edward William Lane (died 1876). It was published in eight volumes during the second half of the 19th century. It consists of Arabic words defined and explained in the English language. But Lane does not use his own knowledge of Arabic to give definitions to the words. Instead, the definitions are taken from older Arabic dictionaries, primarily medieval Arabic dictionaries. Lane translates these definitions into English, and he carefully notes which dictionaries are giving which definitions.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Herbert Giles says he decided to compile "A Chinese-English Dictionary" after his review of Williams' "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language" "brought down on my head many objurgations from the author's friends" (Aylmer 1997: 14, Wilkinson 2000: 93). As Giles explains in his previously unpublished (c. 1918-1925) typescript memoirs, 
[The] review was of Dr Williams' "Syllabic Dictionary" ("Evening Gazette", 16 Sept., 1874), for which I was freely bespattered with abuse from all American quarters. I showed up a multiplicity of absurd blunders and equally egregious omissions; and I wound up with these prophetic words: "We do not hesitate to pronounce Dr Williams the lexicographer, not for the future, but of the past." I at once began upon a dictionary of my own. (Aylmer 1997: 15-16) 
Provoked by the American missionary Williams, Giles devoted himself to publishing a new dictionary that "was meant to bring the glory of having compiled the best Chinese-English dictionary back from America to England" (Yang 2014: 317).
Frank Gibney
While at the "Encyclopædia Britannica" he directed its translation into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. A Japanese translation of the Encyclopedia appeared in 1975. The 1986 Chinese edition was evidently the "first non-Marxist reference work allowed in China." It was a 6-year effort in 10 volumes. The edition dealt "gingerly" with "sensitive" subjects.
A Chinese–English Dictionary
Giles learned that Edmund Backhouse, one of his first Chinese language students at Cambridge, had been trying for years to compile a Chinese-English dictionary. In 1925, he used it to metaphorically describe Chinese bilingual lexicography in terms of international sports competition.
[Backhouse's dictionary] is of course intended to supersede my own work. Well, dictionaries are like dogs, and have their day; and I should be the last person to whine over the appearance of the dictionary of the future, which it is to be hoped will come in good time, and will help to an easier acquisition of "the glorious language." Morrison and Medhurst, both Englishmen, between them held the blue ribbon of Chinese lexicography from 1816 to 1874; then it passed to Wells Williams, who held it for America until 1892, when I think I may claim to have recaptured it for my own country, and to have held it now for thirty-three years. (Aylmer 1997: 38)
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew is a dictionary of English cant and slang by a compiler known only by the initials B. E., first published in London c. 1698. With over 4,000 entries, it was the most extensive dictionary of non-standard English in its time, until it was superseded in 1785 by Francis Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue". B. E.'s "New Dictionary" was used as a source by many subsequent dictionaries.
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.