Kangxi Dictionary

Image of an edition of the beginning of the centuryXX. of the Kangxi Dictionary.

The Kangxi Dictionary (Chinese: 康熙字典, pinyin: Kāngxī zìdiǎn) is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty..

With approximately 47,000 entries, it is one of the most important ancient Chinese dictionaries, both for its size and for its relevance to the history of Chinese lexicography. The characters are classified by means of a system of 214 radicals, which head groups of characters ordered by the number of their strokes. The list of radicals takes up that of the Zìhuì (Traditional Chinese: 字彙, Simplified Chinese: 字汇, “Collection of Characters”) by Méi Yíngzuò (梅膺祚) of 1615. Earlier classification systems were found more complexes; for example, in the Shuōwén there are 540 radicals. The list of radicals in the Kangxi Dictionary is still used in modern traditional-character dictionaries published in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, while a modified form is generally used in simplified-character dictionaries published in mainland China. from this traditional list of radicals. The popularity of this dictionary means that it is often wrongly credited with inventing the list of 214 radicals, sometimes known as the "Kangxi radicals." The ordering of the radicals themselves is not done by number of strokes, but by analogical and poetic groupings.

The pronunciation is indicated by the rules of the fǎnqiē, a system of rhymes that indicate the pronunciation of the syllables. References to books, works, works, and dictionaries that use the input character are added. There is also a rhyming table in which the characters are classified by type of rhyme, tone and initial phoneme of the syllable.

The large number of characters is explained by the exhaustive will of the compilers, who collected, in addition to the characters in common use, graphic variants of the characters, very rare characters used in proper names, and even cases of hapax.

Precisely because of the inclusion of variant forms (often there are many alternative ways of writing the strokes of the same character), the most voluminous modern dictionaries come to surpass the Kangxi Dictionary in number of characters. For example, the Zhōnghuá zì hǎi (中華字海) includes more than 85,000.