Cihai
| Cihai | |||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | |||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | |||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | sea of words | ||||||||||||
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| Korean name | |||||||||||||
| Hangul | |||||||||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||||||||
| Kanji | |||||||||||||
| Hiragana | じかい | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Cíhǎi |
| Wade–Giles | Tz'u-hai |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Chi4hoi2 |
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Revised Romanization | Sa-hae |
| McCune–Reischauer | Sahae |
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Revised Hepburn | Jikai |
The Cihai is a large-scale Chinese dictionary and encyclopedia. The Zhonghua Book Company published the first Cihai edition in 1938, and the Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House revised editions in 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. A standard bibliography of Chinese reference works (Teng and Biggerstaff 1971:134) calls the Cihai an "outstanding dictionary".
The Cihai is a semi-encyclopedic dictionary and enters Chinese words from many fields of knowledge, such as history, science, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and law.
Chinese lexicography dichotomizes two kinds of dictionaries: traditional zidian (, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written Chinese characters and modern cidian ( "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken expressions. For example, the Hanyu Da Zidian for characters and Hanyu Da Cidian for words. The Cihai, as the title indicates, is a cidian.
The American sinologist George A. Kennedy, who wrote a student's guide to using the Cihai as the basis for sinological studies, said the dictionary's principal values are its (1953:85) "explanations for phrases and compound expressions" and (1953:131) "citations illustrating the use of words and expressions."
The Cihai originated when Lufei Kui, founder of the Zhonghua Book Company, decided to publish a comprehensive Chinese dictionary to compete with rival Commercial Press's 1915 Ciyuan (辭源 "source of words") (Wilkinson 2000:89). Under the editorship of Shu Xincheng (舒新城, 1893-1960), over 100 lexicographers worked for two decades to compile the Cihai, which was published in 1936. This 2-volume first edition has over 80,000 entries arranged under single characters in radical-stroke order, with the words and compounds under each character listed by the number of characters and strokes. The definitions are written in wenyan "literary Chinese" (Hartmann 2003:166). The Taiwan branch of Zhonghua published a Cihai reprint in 1956 with minor revisions additions and corrections (Yang 1985:279).
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