The 1615 ''Zìhuì'' is a
Chinese dictionary
Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Han dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for the Chinese language, and this article discusses some of ...
edited by the
Ming Dynasty
The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...
scholar Mei Yingzuo (
梅膺祚). It is renowned for introducing two
lexicographical
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
* Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.
* Theoreti ...
innovations that continue to be used in the present day: the
214-radical system for
indexing Chinese characters, which replaced the classic ''
Shuowen Jiezi
''Shuowen Jiezi'' () is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the '' Erya'' predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give ...
'' dictionary's
540-radical system, and the
radical-and-stroke sorting
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office filin ...
method.
Title
The dictionary title combines ''zì'' "character; script; writing; graph; word" and ''huì'' "gather together; assemble; collection; list". Early forms of the graph ''huì'' 彙 depicted a "hedgehog" (''wèi'' ), and it was borrowed as a
phonetic loan character
All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs () and a number which are ideographic () in origin, inc ...
for the word huì "gather together; collection", both of which, in
the simplified character system, are . In modern Chinese usage, ''zìhuì'' or means "glossary; wordbook; lexicon; dictionary; vocabulary; (computing)
character set
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...
" (''
Wenlin
Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese () is a software application designed by Tom Bishop, who is also president of the Wenlin Institute. It is based on his experience of the needs of learners of the Chinese language, predominantly Mandarin. It con ...
'' 2016).
English translations of ''Zihui'' include "Compendium of Characters", "Collection of Characters", "The Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Characters", and "Character Treasure".
Text
![Four-tone hand diagram](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Four-tone_hand_diagram.png)
The ''Zihui'' dictionary comprises 14 volumes (), with a comprehensive and integrated format that many subsequent Chinese dictionaries followed.
Volume 1 contains the
front matter
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent unit. In the words of renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book design, "though ...
, including Mei Yingzuo's preface dated 1615, style guide, and appendices. For instance, the "Sequences of Strokes" shows the correct
stroke order
Stroke order is the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character (or Chinese derivative character) are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in various forms in Chinese ...
, which is useful for students, "Ancient Forms" uses early
Chinese script styles
In Chinese calligraphy, Chinese characters can be written according to five major styles. These styles are intrinsically linked to the history of Chinese script.
Styles
When used in decorative ornamentation, such as book covers, movie pos ...
to explain the six
Chinese character categories, and "Index of Difficult Characters" lists graphs whose radicals were difficult to identify.
Volume 14 encompasses the
back matter
Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, Word processor, format, design, and sequence of the various components and elements of a book into a coherent unit. In the words of renowned typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), book ...
, with three main appendices. "Differentiation" lists 473 characters with similar forms but different pronunciations and meanings, such as and or and . "Rectification" corrects misunderstandings of 68 characters commonly used in contemporary
printed
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...
books. "Riming" gives
rime tables A rime table or rhyme table () is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the '' Qieyun'' (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a signif ...
intended to explain the
four tones
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin).
Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widel ...
of
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
and ''
fanqie
''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one w ...
'' pronunciation glosses. Note that the above image of early ''Zihui'' dictionaries shows the traditional hand representation of the four tone classes.
The
main body of the ''Zihui'' dictionary is divided into 12 volumes (2-13) called ''ji'' (, collections) and numbered according to the twelve
Earthly Branches
The twelve Earthly Branches or Terrestrial Branches are a Chinese ordering system used throughout East Asia in various contexts, including its ancient dating system, astrological traditions, zodiac and ordinals.
Origin
This system was built ...
. Each one begins with a grid diagram showing all the radicals included in the volume and their page numbers. This reference guide to the volumes made looking up characters more convenient than in the previous dictionaries.
The ''Zihui'' included 33,179
head character entries, most of which were from
Song Lian
Song Lian (; 1310–1381), courtesy name Jinglian (), was a Chinese historian and politician of the Ming dynasty. He was a literary and political advisor to the Hongwu Emperor. Before that, he was one of the principal figures in the Yuan dyn ...
's 1375 ''Hongwu zhengyun'' (洪武正韻,
Hongwu
Hongwu () (23 January 1368 – 5 February 1399) was the era name of the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming dynasty of China. Hongwu was also the Ming dynasty's first era name.
Comparison table
Other eras contemporaneous with Hongwu
* Ch ...
Dictionary of Standard Rhymes). The entries included common characters used in the
Chinese classics
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian ...
and some popular or nonstandard characters (''súzì'' 俗字), both contemporary and early. Mei Yingzuo made his dictionary more easily accessible to the general literate public by using the current
regular script
Regular script (; Hepburn: ''kaisho''), also called (), (''zhēnshū''), (''kǎitǐ'') and (''zhèngshū''), is the newest of the Chinese script styles (popularized from the Cao Wei dynasty c. 200 AD and maturing stylistically around the ...
form of characters. Beginning with the ''Shuowen jiezi'', earlier Chinese dictionaries were arranged according to radicals written in the obsolete
seal script
Seal script, also sigillary script () is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty bronze script. The Qin variant of seal ...
.
The basic format of each ''Zihui'' character entry comprised first the pronunciations including variants, and then the definitions, giving the primary meaning followed by common and extended meanings. In addition to using the traditional ''
fanqie
''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one w ...
'' spelling, Mei indicated pronunciation with a commonly used
homophonous
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
character, no doubt in recognition of the fact that it was "almost impossible for the average reader to derive correct current readings from Tang dynasty ''fanqie''". Definitions are for the most part brief and readily understandable, and reference to a text is almost always given by way of examples, generally from ancient books and partly from colloquial language. ''Zihui'' innovations in dictionary format, such as the arrangement of meanings, the use of plain language, and usage examples from informal language, made the book "exceptional at the time".
The best-known lexicographical advances in Mei Yingzuo's ''Zihui'' are reducing the unwieldy ''Shuowen Jiezi''
540-radical system for collating Chinese characters into the more logical
214-radical system, and arranging graphs belonging to a single radical according to the number of residual strokes, making finding character entries a relatively simple matter. To illustrate the inefficiencies of the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' system, only a few characters are listed under some radicals. For instance, its "man radical" 男, which compounds the modern
"field radical" 田 and the
"power radical" 力, only lists three: ''nan'' 男 ("man; male"), ''sheng'' 甥 ("nephew; niece"), and ''jiu'' 舅 ("uncle; brother in law"). In contrast, the ''Zihui'' eliminates the "man radical" and lists ''nan'' 男 under the "power radical", ''sheng'' 甥 under the
"life radical" 生, and ''jiu'' 舅 under the
"mortar radical" 臼. The 214 radicals are arranged according to stroke number, from the single-stroke
"one radical" 一 to the seventeen-stroke
"flute radical" 龠. The ''Zihui'' character entries are arranged according to the stroke number left after subtracting the respective radical, for instance, the characters under the
"mouth radical" 口 begin with , , and and end with , , and . This "
radical-and-stroke" system remains one of the most common forms of Chinese lexicographic arrangement today,
History
With the possible exception of the 1324 ''
Zhongyuan Yinyun'', there were few advances in Chinese lexicography between the sixth and seventeenth centuries. Many dictionaries prior to the Ming Dynasty were modeled on the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' 540-radical format, and new dictionaries were generally no more than minor revisions and enlargements of older works. Mei Yingzuo's ''Zihui'' represents the "first important lexicographic advance" after this long period. He greatly simplified and rationalized the traditional set of radicals, introduced the principle of indexing graphs according to the number of residual strokes, and wrote characters in contemporary regular script instead of ancient seal script. The importance of Mei's innovations is confirmed by the fact that they were promptly imitated by other Ming and
Qing
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speaki ...
period dictionaries.
The ''Zihui'' also formed the basis for the ''
Zhengzitong
The ''Zhengzitong'' () was a 17th-century Chinese dictionary. The Ming dynasty scholar Zhang Zilie (張自烈; Chang Tzu-lieh) originally published it in 1627 as a supplement to the 1615 ''Zihui'' dictionary of Chinese characters, and called it the ...
'', written and originally published by Zhang Zilie (張自烈) as the 1627 ''Zihui bian'' (字彙辯; "''Zihui'' Disputations") supplemental correction to the ''Zihui'', then purchased by Liao Wenying (廖文英) and republished as the 1671 ''Zhengzitong''. Another Qing dynasty scholar
Wu Renchen
Wu Renchen (吳任臣, ) ( 1628 – 1689), with courtesy names of Zhiyi (志伊), Erqi (爾器) and Zhenghong (征鴻), and an art name of Tuoyuan (託園), was a Chinese historian, mathematician, politician, and writer during the Qing dynasty. Or ...
published the 1666 ''Zihui bu'' (字彙補 "Zihui supplement"). The most important of the works based on the ''Zihui'' model was undoubtedly the 1716 ''
Kangxi Zidian
The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' ( (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing d ...
'', which soon became the standard dictionary of Chinese characters, and continues to be used widely today. After the ''Kangxi Zidian'' adopted Mei's 214-radical system, they have been known as the
Kangxi radicals
The 214 Kangxi radicals (), also known as the Zihui radicals, form a system of radicals () of Chinese characters.
The radicals are numbered in stroke count order. They are the most popular system of radicals for dictionaries that order Traditio ...
rather than "Zihui radicals".
Innovations
The author Thomas Creamer says Mei Yingzuo's ''Zihui'' was "one
fthe most innovative Chinese dictionaries ever compiled" and it "changed the face of Chinese lexicography".
The best-known lexicographical advances in the ''Zihui'' are reducing the unwieldy ''Shuowen Jiezi''
540-radical system for collating Chinese characters into the more logical
214-radical system, and arranging graphs belonging to a single radical according to the number of residual strokes, making finding character entries a relatively simple matter. To illustrate the inefficiencies of the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' system, only a few characters are listed under some radicals. For instance, its "man radical" 男, which compounds the modern
"field radical" 田 and the
"power radical" 力, only lists three: ''nan'' 男 ("man; male"), ''sheng'' 甥 ("nephew; niece"), and ''jiu'' 舅 ("uncle; brother in law"). In contrast, the ''Zihui'' eliminates the "man radical" and lists ''nan'' 男 under the "power radical", ''sheng'' 甥 under the
"life radical" 生, and ''jiu'' 舅 under the
"mortar radical" 臼. The 214 radicals are arranged according to stroke number, from the single-stroke
"one radical" 一 to the seventeen-stroke
"flute radical" 龠. The ''Zihui'' character entries are arranged according to the stroke number left after subtracting the respective radical, for instance, the characters under the
"mouth radical" 口 begin with , , and and end with , , and . This "
radical-and-stroke" system remains one of the most common forms of Chinese lexicographic arrangement today.
The Chinese scholar Zou Feng (邹酆) lists four major lexicographical format innovations that Mei Yingzuo established in the ''Zihui'', and which have been used in many dictionaries up to the present day (1983). First, the ''Zihui'' includes both formal seal script and
clerical script
The clerical script (; Japanese: 隷書体, ''reishotai''; Korean: 예서 (old spelling 례서); Vietnamese: lệ thư), sometimes also chancery script, is a style of Chinese writing which evolved from the late Warring States period to the Qi ...
as well as informal regular script characters, and gives the latter more significance than previously. Second, character entry presentation is improved by including both ''fanqie'' and homophonic phonetic notation, initiating a "more scientific format" for displaying definitions from original through extended meanings, using the label 〇 to display characters with multiple pronunciations and meanings, and indicating characters that have multiple
parts of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...
, all of which are standard format elements in modern Chinese dictionaries. Third, radicals and character entries are classified in a more logical manner, as explained above. Fourth, the ''Zihui'' was the first Chinese dictionary to integrate the main body and appendices into one whole, thus improving practicality for the user.
References
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*
*
Footnotes
External links
字彙 ''Zihui'',
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
字彙補 ''Zihui bu'',
Chinese Text Project
The Chinese Text Project (CTP; ) is a digital library project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books ...
The 214 Radicals 部首 ChinaKnowledge
{{Dictionaries of Chinese
Chinese dictionaries
Ming dynasty literature
1615 books