Ciyuan

Ciyuan
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Literal meaning	source of words
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Cíyuán Wade–Giles Tz'u-yüan Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Chi4yun4
Korean name
Hangul
Transcriptions Revised Romanization Sa-won McCune–Reischauer Sawŏn
Japanese name
Kanji
Hiragana	じげん
Transcriptions Revised Hepburn Jigen

Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	Cíyuán
Wade–Giles	Tz'u-yüan
Yue: Cantonese
Yale Romanization	Chi4yun4

Transcriptions
Revised Romanization	Sa-won
McCune–Reischauer	Sawŏn

Transcriptions
Revised Hepburn	Jigen

The Ciyuan or Tz'u-yüan is the earliest modern encyclopedic Chinese phrase dictionary. The Commercial Press published the first edition Ciyuan in 1915, and reissued it in various formats, including a 1931 supplement, and a fully revised 1979-1984 edition. The latest (3rd) edition was issued in 2015 to commemorate the centenary anniversary of its first publication.

In terms of Chinese lexicography, the Ciyuan is a cidian ( "word/phrase dictionary") for spoken expressions, as opposed to a zidian (, lit. "character/logograph dictionary") for written Chinese characters.

The title word ciyuan 辭源 – which combines ci 辭 "take leave; decline; diction; phrase; word" and yuan 源 "source; cause; origin" – is an old variant for ciyuan 詞源 "word origin; etymology", usually written with ci 詞 "word; term; speech".

The Ciyuan has been popular with Chinese intellectuals. For example, (Reed 2011:3), during the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong carried two modern dictionaries, the Ciyuan and the Cihai.

The lexicographer Reinhard Hartmann (2003:16) predicts that the revised Ciyuan "should remain a basic research tool for all students of China's pre-modern literature and history for many years to come."

The Ciyuan, which is first major Chinese dictionary of the 20th century, has been republished and revised repeatedly.

Chinese lexicographers began compiling the first edition Ciyuan in 1908, with Lu Erkui (陸爾奎, 1862-1935) as editor-in-chief. They chiefly derived material from the 1710 Kangxi Dictionary and 1798 Jingji cuangu (經籍簒詁) dictionary of characters used in the Chinese classics. In 1915, Commercial Press, a major Chinese publishing house, issued the original Ciyuan in two volumes, totaling 3,087 pages, available in large, medium, and small sizes (Teng & Biggerstaff 1971:132).

It contained approximately 100,000 entries (Hartmann 2003:165), with dictionary order by individual character head entries arranged by radical and stroke, using the traditional 214 Kangxi radicals. Phrase and compound entries are grouped under their first character, arranged firstly according to their number of characters, and secondly according to their radicals.

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