From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kangxi Dictionary |
 |
| The Kangxi Dictionary:
2005 reprint |
 |
| Chinese
name |
| Chinese |
康熙字典 |
|
|
| Japanese
name |
| Kanji |
康熙字典 |
| Hiragana |
こうきじてん |
|
|
The Kangxi Dictionary (1716: 康熙字典 Kāngxī zìdiǎn) was the standard Chinese
dictionary during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Kangxi Emperor of
the Manchu Qing
Dynasty ordered its compilation in 1710 and it was published in
1716. The dictionary is named
after the Emperor's era name.
The dictionary contains more than 47,000 characters (including
obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters) but less than a
quarter of these characters are now in common use.
Compilation
The Kangxi Dictionary editors, including Zhang Yushu
(張玉書) and Chen Tingjing (陳廷敬), partly based it on two Ming Dynasty
dictionaries: the 1615 Zihui (字彙 "Character Collection") by Mei Yingzuo
(梅膺祚), and the 1627 Zhengzitong (正字通 "Correct Character Mastery") by
Zhang Zilie (張自烈). Since the imperial edict required that the
Kangxi Dictionary be compiled within five years, a number
of errors were inevitable. The Daoguang Emperor established a review
board and their 1831 Zidian kaozheng (字典考證 "Character Dictionary Textual Research")
corrected 2,588 mistakes, mostly in quotations and citations. (Teng
and Biggerstaff 1971: 130)
The supplemented dictionary contains 47,035 character entries,
plus 1,995 graphic variants, giving a
total of 49,030 different characters. They are grouped under the
214 radicals and arranged by
the number of additional strokes in the character. Although these
214 radicals were first used in the Zihui, due to the popularity of the
Kangxi Dictionary they are known as Kangxi radicals and remain in
modern usage as a method to categorize traditional Chinese characters.
The character entries give variants (if any), pronunciations in
traditional fanqie spelling
and in modern reading of a homophone, different meanings, and quotations
from Chinese books and lexicons. The dictionary also contains rime tables with
characters ordered under syllable rime classes, tones, and initial syllable
onsets.
The Kangxi Dictionary is available in many forms, from
old Qing Dynasty editions in block printing, to
reprints in traditional Chinese
bookbinding, to modern revised editions with essays in
Western-style hardcover,
to the digitized Internet
version.
The Kangxi Dictionary is one of the Chinese
dictionaries used by the Ideographic Rapporteur
Group for the Unicode
standard.
Structure of the Kangxi
dictionary
- Preface by Kangxi Emperor : pp. 1-6 (御製序)
- Notes on the use of the dictionary : pp. 7-12 (凡例)
- Indication of pronunciation of characters : pp. 13-40
(等韻)
- Comprehensive table of contents by radicals : pp. 41-49
(總目)
- Facilitated consulting contents : pp. 50-71 (检字)
- The dictionary proper : pp. 75-1631
- Main text : pp. 75-1538
- Addendum contents : pp. 1539-1544 (補遺)
- Addendum text : pp. 1545-1576
- Appendix contents (No-source-characters) : pp. 1577-1583
(備考)
- Appendix text : pp. 1585-1631
- Postscript : pp. 1633-1635 (後記)
- Textual research : pp. 1637-1683 (考证)
See also
References
- Teng, Ssu-yü and Biggerstaff, Knight. 1971. An Annotated
Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works, 3rd ed.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-03851-7
External
links
Wikis
Search
