Kangxi Dictionary

The compilation of this book began in the forty-ninth year of Kangxi (1710), and it was written in the fifty-fifth year of Kangxi (1716), which lasted six years. Therefore, the title of the book is "Kangxi Dictionary".

The "Kangxi Dictionary" was presided over by the editor-in-chief Zhang Yushu and Chen Tingjing, and the editor-in-chief Ling Shaoxiao, Shi Kui, Zhou Qiwei, and Chen Shiru worked together to complete it. The dictionary adopts the radical classification method to arrange words according to strokes. The whole book of the dictionary is divided into twelve episodes, marked by twelve earthly branches, each episode is divided into three volumes: upper, middle, and lower. The vowel table and its corresponding Chinese characters are arranged according to the classification of vowels, tones, and syllables. A total of 47,035 Chinese characters (47,035) are included, which is one of the main references for the study of Chinese characters.

Kangxi Dictionary is updated based on the Ming Dynasty's two books, Zihui and Zhengzitong. Regarding the mistakes in the two books, Kangxi Dictionary also made some efforts to "identify doubts and correct errors". Kangxi Dictionary has three advantages:

The collection of characters is quite rich, and it was the dictionary with the largest number of words in our country for a long time (until the publication of the "Great Chinese Dictionary" in 1915, with more than 48,000 words, it exceeded it).

Second, it is classified into 214 radicals, and annotated with anti-tangent phonetic, source, and reference, etc., almost enumerating the different sound cuts and different meanings of each word for users to review.

3. Except for the remote meanings of the remote characters, it gives examples under almost every word and every meaning; almost all of these examples are ancient books that quote "first view".

There are two shortcomings to this dictionary:

1. The book lists phenomena in anti-criticism and exhortation without standards. The author rarely puts forward his own opinions, which is not conducive to beginners 'use;

Second, there are many omissions and errors. Wang cited 12 volumes of the Kangxi Dictionary and corrected 2,588 errors, which are only part of the errors.

According to historical records, during the Daoguang period more than 100 years after the "Kangxi Dictionary" was written, Qianjia School scholar Wang Yinzhi and others were ordered to investigate the errors in the "Kangxi Dictionary" and compile the "Dictionary Research", correcting a total of 2,588 errors in quotations, prefixes, interpretations, and examples and meanings. Modern Japanese scholar Wen Watanabe re-edited the "Kangxi Dictionary" and found more than 4,000 errors (most of which were repeated with Wang Yinzhi).