Cihai
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese辭海
Simplified Chinese辞海
Literal meaningsea of words
Korean name
Hangul사해
Japanese name
Kanji辞海
Hiraganaじかい

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.[1] A standard bibliography of Chinese reference works[2] calls the Cihai an "outstanding dictionary".

Contents

The Cihai is a semi-encyclopedic dictionary and enters Chinese words from many fields of knowledge, such as history, science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and law.

Chinese lexicography dichotomizes two kinds of dictionaries: traditional zìdiǎn (字典, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written Chinese characters and modern cídiǎn (辭典 "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken expressions. For example, the Hanyu Da Zidian for characters and Hanyu Da Cidian for words. The Cihai, as the title indicates, is a cídiǎn.

The American sinologist George A. Kennedy, who wrote a student's guide to using the Cihai as the basis for sinological studies, said the dictionary's principal values are its "explanations for phrases and compound expressions"[3] and "citations illustrating the use of words and expressions."[4]

History

1937 first edition Cihai

The Cihai originated when Lufei Kui, founder of the Zhonghua Book Company, decided to publish a comprehensive Chinese dictionary to compete with rival Commercial Press's 1915 Ciyuan (辭源 "source of words").[5] Under the editorship of Shu Xincheng (舒新城, 1893–1960), Shen Yi (沈颐) and others,[citation needed] over 100 lexicographers worked for two decades to compile the Cihai, which was published in 1936. This 2-volume first edition has over 80,000 entries arranged under single characters in radical-stroke order, with the words and compounds under each character listed by the number of characters and strokes. The definitions are written in wenyan "literary Chinese".[6] The Taiwan branch of Zhonghua published a Cihai reprint in 1956 with minor revisions additions and corrections.[7]

Plans for a second edition began after a 1958 conference about revising the Cihai and Ciyuan. The Cihai Editorial Committee organized over 5000 scholars and specialists to undertake the new compilation, concentrating on revising the first edition entries and adding modern terminology, especially scientific and technical terminology. Reinhard Hartmann describes the editorial work of revising Cihai as taking "a tortuous course, 22 years from start to finish".[6] After the original editor-in-chief Shu Xincheng died in 1960, he was succeeded by Chen Wangdao, who died in 1977, and was succeeded by Xia Zhengnong (夏征农, 1904–2008). From 1961 to 1962, sixteen shiyong (試用 "trial") individual subject-matter fascicles were distributed for comments by specialists, and in 1965 a weidinggao (未定稿 "draft manuscript") Cihai was completed, but the anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) halted editorial work.[8] Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House (上海辭書出版社) published the three-volume revised edition Cihai in 1979 and a condensed single-volume version in 1980.

The revised 1979 edition has the same title and layout as the original 1936 edition, but serves a much different purpose.[5] The first edition covers China's past and uses literary Chinese for definitions, while the second edition also covers modern China and international matters and uses baihua "colloquial speech". It contains 106,578 entries, totaling more than 13.4 million characters. The single character headwords are arranged under 250 radicals, with subsequent words listed according to stroke numbers. The third volume appends useful charts (e.g., a chronology of Chinese history), tables (weights and measures), lists (Ethnic minorities in China), and a pinyin index to single characters.

The 1989 three-volume edition Cihai was also compiled with Xia Zhengnong as editor-in-chief. It focused upon the addition of 20th-century terms, more proper names, and technical vocabulary. This third edition Cihai contains 16,534 head characters, with more than 120,000 entries, totaling over 15.8 million characters.[9]

1999 compact fourth edition Cihai

The 1999 Cihai contains 17,674 head characters, 122,835 entries, totaling more than 19.8 million characters. This fourth edition dictionary added many color tables and illustrations. Arrangement is by radicals and there are stroke-count, four-corner, pinyin, and foreign-language indexes.[5] It was also published in a compact version.

Cihai was consulted in the writing of The First Series of Standardized Forms of Words with Non-standardized Variant Forms.[10]: 3 

The 2009 fifth edition Cihai contains more than 127,200 entries, arranged by pinyin, with over 22 million characters total. Chen Zhili replaced Xia Zhengnong as chief editor, and lexicographers deleted about 7,000 entries for outdated terms and added almost 10,000 for neologisms. Volumes 1-4 contain text, with many color illustrations, and Volume 5 contains indexes.

The Dacihai (大辞海 "Great sea of words") is a 38-volume encyclopedia project that began in 2004, and published the first volumes in 2008.

Publications

Cihai by Chung Hwa Book Company, Limited

Cihai by Chung Hwa Book Company (Hong Kong) Limited

Cihai by New Star Press

Cihai by Zhonghua Book Company

Cihai by Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House

Cihai edition dictionaries by Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House

Cihai edition dictionaries are specialized dictionaries for languages.

Cihai by Tung Hua Book Co., Ltd.

Cihai by The Commercial Press, Ltd.

Dacihai

Lawsuit

After Tung Hua Book Co., Ltd. had published Cihai from Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House, Chung Hwa Book Company, Limited requested Tung Hua Book not to use 'Cihai' as book title to avoid trademark violation. The Taiwan-based Chung Hwa Book Company, Limited already registered 'Cihai' as trademark for printed material in 1985 prior to THB's publication, but the book's content was licensed from Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House, whom had authorized the use of contents to THB.[24]

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b 夏征农; 陈至立, eds. (September 2009). 辞海：第六版彩图本 [Cihai (Sixth Edition in Color)] (in Chinese). 上海. Shanghai: 上海辞书出版社. Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House. p. 2. ISBN 9787532628599. 上海辞书出版社
  2. ^ Teng, Ssu-yü and Biggerstaff, Knight (1971), An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works, 3rd ed., Harvard University Press. p. 134.
  3. ^ Kennedy 1953, p. 85.
  4. ^ Kennedy 1953, p. 131.
  5. ^ a b c Wilkinson, Endymion (2000), Chinese History: a manual, revised and enlarged ed., Harvard University Asia Center. p. 89.
  6. ^ a b Hartmann, R.R.K. (2003), Lexicography: Reference Works across Time, Space, and Languages, Taylor & Francis. p. 166.
  7. ^ Yang, Paul Fu-mien (1985), Chinese Lexicology and Lexicography: A Selected and Classified Bibliography, Chinese University Press. p. 279.
  8. ^ Huang 1993, p. 220.
  9. ^ Huang 1993, pp. 223–4.
  10. ^ 国家语言文字工作委员会 (20 April 2016). 第一批异形词整理表（试行） (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 27 November 2018. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  11. ^ 一部1936年的老辞海
  12. ^ 《辭海》百年歷史上的三種分冊版
  13. ^ 《辞海》又出音序普及本
  14. ^ 《常用俗语辞典（辞海版）》
  15. ^ 《歇后语小词典》
  16. ^ 《歇后语小词典（新一版）》
  17. ^ 《歇后语小词典》
  18. ^ 《歇后语小词典》
  19. ^ 《歇后语小词典（双色版）》
  20. ^ 《中国俗语大辞典（辞海版）（新1版）》
  21. ^ 《中国俗语大辞典（辞海版）（袖珍本）》
  22. ^ 《中国俗语大辞典（辞海版）（普及本）》
  23. ^ "辭海 最新增訂本". Archived from the original on 2017-05-18. Retrieved 2017-05-30.
  24. ^ 著作權法漫談(22)：商標專用權與著作權的糾葛問題

External links

Dictionaries for scripts using Chinese characters
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