The ''Zhengzitong'' () was a 17th-century

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 ...

. The

Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last orthodox dynasty of China ruled by the Han peop ...

scholar Zhang Zilie (張自烈; Chang Tzu-lieh) originally published it in 1627 as a supplement to the 1615 ''

Zihui The 1615 ''Zìhuì'' is a Chinese dictionary edited by the Ming Dynasty scholar Mei Yingzuo ( 梅膺祚). It is renowned for introducing two lexicographical innovations that continue to be used in the present day: the 214-radical system for ind ...

'' dictionary of

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

, and called it the ''Zihui bian'' (字彙辯; "''Zihui'' Disputations"). The

Qing dynasty 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 ...

author Liao Wenying (廖文英; Liao Wen-ying) bought Zhang's manuscript, renamed it ''Zhengzitong'', and published it under his own name in 1671. The received edition ''Zhengzitong'' has over 33,000 headwords in 12 fascicles ( 卷). Following the format of the ''Zihui'', the character headwords give alternate graphs, ''

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 ...

'' spellings, definitions, explanations, and citations from

Chinese classic texts 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 ...

. Zhang Zilie was a native of

Jiangxi Province Jiangxi (; ; formerly romanized as Kiangsi or Chianghsi) is a landlocked province in the east of the People's Republic of China. Its major cities include Nanchang and Jiujiang. Spanning from the banks of the Yangtze river in the north into ...

, and his ''Zhengzitong'' contains many linguistically valuable dialectal terms from Southeastern China. The famous 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 ...

'' relied heavily upon the ''Zhengzitong''.Liu Yeqiu 刘叶秋. 1992. ''Zhongguo zidian shilue'' 中国字典史略 ("Historical Outline of Chinese Dictionaries"). Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju. pp. 135-9 (in Chinese).
Nagatomi Aochi 永富青地. 1996. "正字通". In ''Nihon jisho jiten'' 日本辞書辞典 ("Encyclopedia of Dictionaries Published in Japan"), ed. Okimori Takuya 沖森卓也, et al., p. 163. Tokyo: Ōfū. (in Japanese).

References

External links

正字通 scanned text
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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 ...

{{Dictionaries of Chinese Ming dynasty Chinese classic texts Chinese dictionaries