A Chinese-English Dictionary
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| Author | Herbert Allen Giles |
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| Country | China |
| Language | Chinese, English |
| Publisher | Kelly and Walsh |
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Publication date
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1892 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | xlvi, 1415 |
| OCLC | 272554592 |
A Chinese-English Dictionary (1892), compiled by the British consular officer and sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), is the first Chinese-English encyclopedic dictionary. Giles started compilation after being rebuked for criticizing mistranslations in Samuel Wells Williams' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language. The 1,461-page first edition contains 13,848 Chinese character head entries alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade-Giles system, which Giles modified from Thomas Wade's (1867) system. Giles' dictionary furthermore gives pronunciations from nine regional varieties of Chinese, and three Sino-Xenic languages Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Giles revised his dictionary into the 1,813-page second edition (1912) with the addition of 67 more entries and numerous usage examples.
Herbert Giles served as a British consular officer in late Qing dynasty China until from 1867 to 1892. After his return to England, he was appointed the second professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, in succession to Thomas Francis Wade. They are renowned for developing what was later called the Wade-Giles romanization system of Chinese, which Giles' A Chinese-English Dictionary firmly established as the standard in the Western world until the 1958 official international pinyin system (Wilkinson 2000: 93).
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