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The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (三 倉, sāncāng), was a c. 220 BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script.
The Hanyu Da Cidian includes over 23,000 head Chinese character entries, defines some 370,000 words, and gives 1,500,000 citations. The head entries, which are collated by a novel 200 radical system, are given in traditional Chinese characters while simplified Chinese characters are noted. Definitions and explanations are in simplified ...
A page from the Yiqiejing yinyi, the oldest extant Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology – Dunhuang manuscripts, c. 8th century. There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: 'character dictionaries' (字典; zìdiǎn) list individual Chinese characters, and 'word dictionaries' (辞典; 辭典; cídiǎn) list words and phrases.
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
The List of Frequently Used Characters in Modern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语常用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語常用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo) is a list of 3,500 frequently-used Chinese characters, which are further divided into two levels: 2,500 frequently-used characters and 1,000 less frequently-used characters.
First Chinese dictionary collated in single-sort alphabetical order of pinyin, John DeFrancis: A Chinese-English Dictionary: 1892: Herbert Allen Giles' bestselling dictionary, 2nd ed. 1912 A Dictionary of the Chinese Language: 1815–1823: First Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary, Robert Morrison: A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese ...
Historically, neighboring states and peoples of China were often given exonyms or descriptions that were pejorative in nature. For instance, the first exonym for Japan from the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 24 CE) was the Chinese Wo or Japanese Wa 倭 meaning "submissive; dwarf barbarian"; this was replaced by the endonym 日本 (rìběn) by the 8th century.
Since the sources for the wasei kango included ancient Chinese texts as well as contemporary English-Chinese dictionaries, some of the compounds—including 文化 bunka ('culture', Mandarin wénhuà) and 革命 kakumei ('revolution', Mandarin gémìng)—might have been independently coined by Chinese translators, had Japanese writers not ...