Kangxi Dictionary

The Kangxi Dictionary is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters. Wanting an improvement upon earlier dictionaries, as well as to show his concern for Confucian culture and to foster standardization of the Chinese writing system, its compilation was ordered by the Kangxi Emperor in 1710, from whom the compendium gets its name. The dictionary was the largest of its kind, containing 47,043 character entries. Around 40% of them were graphical variants, while others were dead, archaic, or found only once in the Classical Chinese corpus. In today's vernacular written Chinese, fewer than a quarter of the dictionary's characters are commonly used. The text is available in many forms, from Qing dynasty block print editions, to reprints using traditional Chinese bookbinding, to Western-style hardcovers including revisions and ancillary essays, to a digitized version accessible via the internet. Compilation In his preface to the 1716 printing, the emperor wrote: Every time I read widely in the commentaries on the classics, the pronunciations and meanings are complex and obscure, and each person protects his own explanations according to his individual view, so that it is not likely that any will communicate everything without gaps. Thus I have ordered the scholar officials to acquire all the old documents, then to arrange them and revise them. The emperor chose the term himself—at the time not having a meaning of 'dictionary', but rather something like a 'compendium' of 'standard' or 'model' characters, as to show their correct forms and authoritative pronunciations. The compendium was generally referred to simply as , which later became a standard Chinese word for 'dictionary' in the 19th century, and used to title practically every Chinese dictionary published since then. Classical Chinese is largely morphosyllabic with very few bound morphemes, meaning that most individual characters represented independent words. As such, the compilers did not make a distinction between senses of as 'characters' versus as 'words'; this distinction would only begin to be clearly made during the late 19th century.